Paramjit Arora, Immediate Past President of the American Peptide Society and professor of chemistry at New York University, has received a 2026 Cottrell Singular Exceptional Endeavors of Discovery (SEED) Award from Research Corporation for Science Advancement. His funded project, "Sequence-Specific Small Molecule Ligands for Duplex RNA Recognition," pursues ligands capable of reading duplex RNA with sequence specificity – a recognition problem that has long resisted the design logic that works so well for duplex DNA.
The SEED program supports Cottrell Scholars and Robert Holland Jr. Award recipients as they pursue high-risk, high-reward ideas at the earliest and most exploratory stage of discovery, before preliminary data exists to attract conventional funding. Research Corporation president and CEO Eric Isaacs noted in announcing the cohort that the most transformative science often starts as an untested idea
, and that the program exists to give scientists room to test it.
Awards are made through two tracks. New Research Directions, under which Arora was funded, is open to scientists at research universities and primarily undergraduate institutions who are opening genuinely new lines of inquiry. Exceptional Opportunities advances promising work already underway at primarily undergraduate institutions. This year's cohort of ten scientists spans nine projects – Lou Charkoudian and Casey Londergan of Haverford College share one – with each project receiving $60,000, for total funding of $540,000. Research Corporation reported a record application pool this year, and Cottrell Scholars Senior Program Director Silvia Ronco described the selected projects as standing out for creativity and ambition.
The other recipients are Natalia Shustova (University of South Carolina), Sarah Keller (University of Washington), Jay Foley (University of North Carolina Charlotte), Jahan Dawlaty (University of Southern California), Sean Roberts (University of Texas at Austin), Jane Liu (Pomona College), Charkoudian and Londergan (Haverford College), and Dennis Cao (Macalester College). Their projects range across switchable metal coordination frameworks, membrane phase separation in yeast, quantum photonics, light-gated bond formation, riboswitch-based biosensors, and helicene imide synthesis. This is the eleventh year Research Corporation has run the SEED program.
The American Peptide Society congratulates Dr. Arora on the award. Full details of the 2026 cohort are available from Research Corporation for Science Advancement.
