Saba Valadkhan (Persian: صبا ولدخان) is an Iranian American biomedical scientist, and an Assistant Professor and RNA researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
[1] 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" [2] - 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".
[5] Valadkhan studied the role of small nuclear RNAs in the human spliceosome under the supervision of Prof. James Manley.
Valadkhan was presented with the Harold Weintraub award from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle for her doctoral thesis.
She was also awarded the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) Young Scientist Grand Prize in the same year.