Professor Yimon Aye recognised in Royal Society of Chemistry 2026 Prizes

Professor Yimon Aye, Pembroke Fellow in Organic Chemistry, has been awarded the Corday-Morgan Mid-Career Prize for Chemistry in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2026 Prizes. This recognises her pioneering contributions to the development of live-cell-based tools that can elucidate, reprogramme and chemically manipulate biological signalling mechanisms.

Professor Aye’s research programme studies a nuanced mode of cellular communication and decision-making, which her group has termed “precision electrophile signalling”. The process is triggered by natural reactive small-molecule signals which can help cells to mount rapid stress responses and survive challenging conditions. However, the molecules are highly reactive, making it difficult to distinguish meaningful signalling events from off-target effects.

The Aye Lab has pioneered methods to map these chemical signalling events in cultured cells and whole organisms with a level of biological context and control that was previously inaccessible. These advances have important implications for drug development and for understanding stress-related disease.

Professor Aye comments, “I feel humbled to receive what is unexpected news for us, as it is also our team’s first UK-based honour; and as always I feel an enormous sense of gratitude for the dedicated efforts of numerous former/present team members that altogether make possible such wider recognitions for our laboratory.”

The RSC prizes celebrate outstanding contributions to research and innovation across the chemical sciences, with The Corday-Morgan Mid-Career Prize for Chemistry given in celebration of exceptional people advancing the chemical sciences across industry and academia.