Saba Valadkhan

Saba Valadkhan is an Iranian American biomedical scientist, and an Assistant Professor and RNA researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2005, she was awarded the GE / Science Young Scientist Award for her breakthrough in understanding the mechanism of spliceosomes - "akin to finding the Holy Grail of the splicing catalysis field" - a critical area of research, given that "20 percent or 30 percent of all human genetic diseases are caused by mistakes that the spliceosome makes".

Education Valadkhan qualified as a medical doctor at Tehran University of Medial Sciences in Iran in 1996. She moved to the United States to pursue her Ph.D. at Columbia University, in New York City. In 2004, she joined Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio as an Assistant Professor.

Doctoral research Valadkhan studied the role of small nuclear RNAs in the human spliceosome under the supervision of Prof. James L. Manley.

In 2006, she became a founding member of the Rosalind Franklin Society. She was also honoured with the Nsoroma Award from Cleveland Chapter of the National Technical Association in 2006.