| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Jeanne Altmann | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 205. Microbiology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Jeanne Altmann is currently Eugene Higgins Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Emerita at Princeton University. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1979 and went on to work for the Chicago Zoological Society, the Brookfield Zoo, and the University of Chicago. She moved to Princeton in 1998.
Jeanne Altmann is one of the generation of pioneering female primatologists and since 1971 has carried out long-term field research on baboons in Amboseli National Park, Kenya (together with her now deceased husband Stuart Altmann). She came to primatology from mathematics and her 1974 paper “Observational Study of Behaviour Sampling Methods” revolutionized field primatology with a solid mathematical analytical methodology, the importance of which was clearly demonstrated in her now classic 1980 book, Baboon Mothers and Infants. Throughout her long career (and over 160 publications) her research has dealt with life history approaches to behavioral ecology, emphasizing an integrated approach involving studies of behavior, ecology, demography, genetics, and physiology at the level of individuals, social groups, and populations. Most recently she and her collaborators have been focused on studies that relate endocrine and genetic data to demographic and behavioral information for the same individuals in the Amboseli baboon population.
Jeanne Altmann has won the Exemplar Award of the Animal Behavior Society in 1996, the Distinguished Primatologist Award of the American Society of Primatologists in 2006, the Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award of the Animal Behavior Society in 2012, the Sewell Wright Award of the American Society of Naturalists in 2013, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Primatological Society in 2014. She is a member of the Animal Behavior Society (president, 1985-86), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1996), and the National Academy of Sciences (2003). Jeanne Altmann was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Scott Edwards | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1963 | | | | | | |
Scott Edwards is currently Alexander Agassiz Professor, Curator of Birds at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, after which he spent a decade at the University of Washington.
Scott Edwards pioneered the application of genomics and population genetic approaches to natural populations of birds. He creatively integrates theory with field, museum, and laboratory research. Edwards has led his field of ornithology into the age of genomics by examining genomic evolution in a setting that applies population genetics, systematics, and natural history to diverse questions. His work has broad generality beyond the target taxa, and he has contributed importantly to both theory and methods. His lab applies cutting edge population genetics to studies on diverse problems in genomics and evolutionary biology. With Beerli he modernized phylogeography. With Liu and Pearl he developed methods that promise to revolutionize phylogenetic analyses of large molecular datasets. He has made extensive contributions to understanding behavioral evolution, speciation, and biogeography of Australian birds. Edwards is a versatile and prolific scientist who has proven to be an effective communicator and a wonderful role model.
In 2015 he won the Elliot Coues Award of the American Ornithologists Union. He is a member of the Society of Systematic Biology (president, 2009), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2009), the American Genetic Association (president, 2011), and the National Academy of Sciences (2015). Scott Edwards was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. David Ginsburg | | | Institution: | University of Michigan | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
David Ginsburg is James V. Neel Distinguished University Professor of Internal Medicine and Human Genetics, Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Medicine, a member of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan Medical School, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received his B.A. degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University in 1974 and his M.D. degree from Duke University School of Medicine in 1978. Dr. Ginsburg is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hematology, Oncology, and Clinical Genetics. His postdoctoral clinical and research training was at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ginsburg joined the faculty at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in 1985. Dr. Ginsburg’s laboratory studies the components of the blood-clotting system and how disturbances in their function lead to human bleeding and blood-clotting disorders. The lab has studied the molecular basis of the common disorder von Willebrand disease and is identifying modifier genes that control severity for this and related diseases. The lab has also defined mutations in ADAMTS13, an enzyme that processes von Willebrand factor, as the cause of Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia Purpura. The lab also studies the plasminogen activation system, the mechanism by which blood clots are broken down, and has explored the role of this system in a variety of disease processes including atherosclerosis and microbial infection. Finally, studies of the bleeding disease combined deficiency of factors V and VIII identified mutations in a novel pathway for the transport of a select subset of proteins from the ER to the Golgi, leading the Ginsburg lab to further exploration of the intracellular secretory machinery and its role in human disease. Dr. Ginsburg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and recipient of the E. Donnall Thomas Lecture and Prize and Stratton Medal from the American Society of Hematology, the Basic Research Prize and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Heart Association, the Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award from the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the AAMC Award for Distinguished Research in the Biomedical Sciences, and the Lucian Award from McGill University. He is a past president of the ASCI and has served on the Councils for the AAP, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Ginsburg has served on multiple Editorial Boards and Advisory Councils in both academics and industry. He recently served as a member of the Board of Directors for Shire plc, and is currently on Scientific Advisory Boards for Portola Pharmaceuticals and Syros Pharmaceuticals. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Carl June | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Carl June is a physician scientist and the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the Departments of Medicine and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He is the director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, and the Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. June graduated from the US Naval Academy and earned his medical degree in from the Baylor College of Medicine. He spent his fourth year of medical school at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, studying immunology and malaria. June conducted postdoctoral research in transplantation biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle from 1983 to 1986. June has published more than 500 manuscripts and is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and has been named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He is the scientific founder of Xcyte Therapies Inc. and Tmunity Therapeutics. CTL019, the CAR T cell developed in the June laboratory was the first gene therapy to be approved by the US FDA in August 2017. The therapy developed by Dr. June’s team is now approved and marketed by Novartis in the US, Europe and Japan. Carl June was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan | | | Institution: | MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology; Trinity College; Royal Society, London | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 206. Physiology, Biophysics, and Pharmacology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Venki Ramakrishnan was born and grew up in India. At the age of 19, he left for the United States to pursue a PhD in physics, but his interests soon turned to biology. He spent almost three decades in the USA before moving to England to work in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Most of his work has been on central problems in molecular biology, including how our DNA is packaged in cells and how genetic information is "read" to make the proteins they specify. This process is carried out by the ribosome, an enormous molecular complex of about half a million atoms. He and others determined the precise atomic structure of the ribosome which helped us to understand how it worked. The work also showed how many antibiotics work by blocking bacterial ribosomes, which could help to design better antibiotics. For this work, he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Since 2015, Ramakrishnan has been president of the Royal Society, one of the oldest scientific organizations in the world, and is a leading voice for British science.
Ramakrishnan is also the author of a popular memoir, Gene Machine, which tells about the quest for the structure of the ribosome and also describes in very frank terms what it is like to be an outsider who found himself in the middle of a race for an important problem. It talks about how science is done with its mixture of insights and persistence as well as blunders and dead ends, and how scientists behave, with their mixture of competition and collaboration, their egos, insecurities and jealousies, but also their kindness and generosity.
Venki Ramakrishnan was elected a member of the Americn Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 6 | Name: | Sir John Skehel | | | Institution: | The Francis Crick Institute; Royal Society; National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
John Skehel
I graduated BSc at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1962, and PhD in biochemistry at Manchester University in 1966. I began research on viruses in Aberdeen University, and at Duke University, North Carolina, and in 1969 I returned to the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London where I have spent all my research career. I work mainly on influenza viruses, how they infect cells, how they frequently change, and how we protect ourselves against them.
Between 1975 and 1994 I was Director of the WHO International Centre for reference and research on influenza viruses at Mill Hill. From 1987 until 2006, I was Director of the Institute and Head of Infections and Immunity, positions that allowed me to enjoy and support the Institute’s unique research environment. This was a great privilege and I was fortunate to be able to continue my research in the Division of Virology. Currently I am in the same laboratory at the newly formed Francis Crick Institute.
I am a Fellow of the University of Wales, of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Member of the Academia Europaea, and an International Member of the American Philosophical Society and National Academy of Sciences of the USA. I was knighted in 1996. | |
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