Earlier this week, 52 individuals and teams at ISU learned they received one of 12 COVID-19 Exceptional Effort Awards, announced in October to recognize the extraordinary and innovative ways Iowa Staters strived to overcome the challenges of the pandemic. Ryan Andrews, a Ph.D. candidate in Biochemistry in the lab of Professor Walter Moss, was among four exceptional graduate students to receive a Graduate Student Research Impact Award “for important discoveries in the functional annotation of the SARS-CoV-2 genome”.

This award recognizes both his scientific achievements in unlocking structure/function relationships in SARS-CoV-2 and his ability to drive forward ISU’s research mission in the challenging era of the COVID-19 pandemic. A highlight of his work was the identification of multiple elements within the viral genome that are actively being targeted, both here at ISU and at other institutions, with novel therapeutics to better treat COVID-19.