ATLANTA―Farah D. Lubin, PhD, FAES, will be presented with the 2025 Distinguished Service Award during the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Epilepsy Society (AES). Established in 1993, the AES Distinguished Service Award recognizes outstanding service by an individual in the field of epilepsy, including non-educational and non-scientific, with an emphasis on exemplary contributions to advancing AES' mission and service to its members.
Dr. Lubin is a Distinguished and Triton Endowed Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She earned her BS, summa cum laude, in biology/chemistry from Alabama State University, her PhD in cell/molecular biology from SUNY Binghamton University and completed two postdoctoral fellowships at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Lubin is director of the NIH/NINDS Neuroscience Roadmap Scholars Program at UAB, which aims to enhance engagement and retention of graduate trainees in neurosciences.
Dr. Lubin is focused on studying the epigenetic basis for transcription programs in the healthy and diseased brain. She and others have observed that neurons have ‘hijacked’ epigenetic processes such as DNA methylation, posttranslational histone modifications, and non-coding RNAs to coordinate gene transcription changes in mature, non-dividing neurons during memory formation.
Dr. Lubin uses interdisciplinary methods ranging from molecular neuroscience to cutting edge tools such as CRISPR/dCas9 gene editing to understand how neuronal activity alters the epigenome to direct gene expression patterns. Her work has provided insights into epigenetic mechanisms that participate in the regulation of gene expression during memory encoding, allocation, storage and recall in hopes of unraveling the causes of cognitive deficits and to develop treatment options.