Andrew Feig, Ph.D., Associate Dean, Graduate School and Professor of Chemistry has been awarded the 2017 Lifetime Service Award from the RNA Society. The RNA Society is a non-profit, international scientific society dedicated to research and education in the field of RNA science. Feig has served as CFO of the Society since 2013 during which time he established formal investment policies for the Society creating a significant endowment that now supports a variety of Society activities to support its members. He will receive the Lifetime Service Award at a ceremony at the 2017 RNA Society meeting in Prague this June.

Prof. Andrew Feig joined the Wayne State University faculty in the Department of Chemistry in 2006. His laboratory studies bacterial gene regulation by small non-coding RNAs and the biochemistry, chemical biology, and biophysics of Clostridium difficile toxins A & B. Prof. Feig was an early adopter of inquiry-based teaching methods to improve student engagement.

As Associate Dean in the Graduate School, he spearheaded the institutional adoption of IDPs campus-wide. He oversaw the development of the WSU Doctoral Alumni Census that tracks 3000 Ph.D. alumni from 1999 to the present through their career trajectories. He implemented the Student Lifecycle Project which uses contract relationship management software to aggregate student data, research outputs, mentoring activities, and participation professional development training to provide a highly granular portrait of the doctoral student experience and then seamlessly juxtapose those activities to career outcomes for analysis. He is a member of the steering committee of the NIH-funded WSU-BEST program focused on improving mentoring and experiential learning opportunities for doctoral students who wish to pursue non-academic careers. He serves as PI of the NSF-funded WSU-WIDER and WSU-SSTEPs programs focused on institutional transformation through the wide-spread adoption of evidence-based teaching practices in foundational courses. Prof. Feig helped design the REBUILDetroit program and serves as Director of the Research Enrichment Core of this NIH-funded, 5-year, $21 million effort to improve diversity among students entering into biomedical research careers. REBUILDetroit helps underrepresented students succeed by providing culturally responsive mentoring, peer- and near-peer learning communities, novel first year curricula focused on authentic research experiences and early entry into mentored research in biomedical disciplines, broadly defined.