By Jade Boyd
Special to Rice News
Rice University bioscientist Yousif Shamoo has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.
The lifetime honor, one of the highest in the scientific community, is accorded to fewer than 1% of AAAS members each year. Shamoo, the Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor in the Department of Biosciences, was recognized “for distinguished contributions to research on multidrug resistance, protein structure and evolution and evolutionary trajectories in bacteria by combining approaches from biophysics, genomics and other physicochemical methods.”
His research interests center on the underlying biophysical principles of adaptation within bacterial populations, and his group has increasingly focused on research related to the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in hospitals. Using a variety of experimental methods, Shamoo and his students have sought to link changes in protein structure and function to their resulting phenotypes within evolving populations. Using that knowledge, they also have worked to predict the success or failure of specific adaptive traits and to identify new targets and strategies to combat antibiotic resistance.
“The struggle against antibiotic resistance is one of the great challenges confronting biomedicine,” Shamoo said. “For every new antibiotic, bacteria have always evolved resistance. As I tell my students, it is a continuous battle. We cannot win, but we cannot afford to lose.”
Shamoo earned his doctorate in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University. He joined Rice in 1998, is a four-time recipient of the university’s George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching and in 2015 received Rice’s top teaching honor, the George R. Brown Award for Excellence in Teaching. He currently serves as a member of the National Institutes of Health Genetic Variation and Evolution Study Section and as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense.
Shamoo served as director of Rice’s interdisciplinary Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering for six years and as Rice’s vice provost for research from 2014-22, a period marked by both a 50% increase in sponsored research funding and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Beyond my work as a scientist, I am especially proud of my service as one the principal scientific architect of Rice’s COVID-19 public health strategy, which was among the most successful in the nation,” he said.
Shamoo is among 502 newly elected fellows AAAS announced this month. They are the association’s 150th annual class of fellows and will be formally honored at the organization’s Fellows Forum Sept. 21 in Washington, D.C.