Professor Iain Mattaj FRS FRSE FMedSci

Iain Mattaj is Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. He is distinguished for his basic research studies of transport between the nucleus and cytoplasm and of the post-transcriptional processing of RNA. He was the first to define signals that specified the import and export of ribonucleoprotein particles into and out of the cell nucleus. He was also the first to identify a protein involved in RNA export to the cytoplasm, namely the cap binding complex and recently he has discovered a novel receptor for the export of proteins and ribonucleoproteins from the nucleus to the cytoplasm.