Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Anna Katherine Behrensmeyer | | | Institution: | National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Anna K. “Kay’ Behrensmeyer is a paleontologist and geologist who is recognized as a pioneer in the field of taphonomy and the study of land environments and faunas through geological time, with particular focus on the paleoecology of human evolution in Africa. She is originally from Quincy, Illinois and earned her undergraduate degree in geology from Washington University, St. Louis, and her doctorate in vertebrate paleontology and sedimentology from the Department of Geological Sciences, Harvard University. After post-doctoral positions at UC Berkeley and Yale University and an interval of teaching at UC Santa Cruz, in 1981 she became a Research Curator in Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. She has served as Acting Associate Director for Science at NMNH (1993-96), co-Director of the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems (ETE) Program since 1988, and Deep Time Initiative Lead Scientist since 2014. Her research uses geology, paleontology, and ecology to investigate the paleoecology of land environments, and she has worked in time intervals ranging from the Permian to the Pleistocene in North America, Africa, and Pakistan. Through experiments and field observations in both modern and past environments, she has built understanding of processes that affect organic remains and control the information content of the fossil record. Much of her work has been collaborative and focused on synergizing team efforts to investigate ecological change through geological time. She has been involved with museum-based education and outreach and was a member of the exhibit core time for the recently renovated Deep Time Fossil Hall at NMNH. Awards include the 2016 R.C Moore Medal (SEPM), the 2018 Romer-Simpson Medal (Society of Vertebrate Paleontology), the 2018 Paleontological Society Medal, and the 2019 G.K. Warren Prize (National Academy of Sciences). She also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Kay lives in Arlington, Virginia, and is married to William F. Keyser. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Kristen Hawkes | | | Institution: | Univresity of Utah | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Kristen Hawkes is Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at the University of Utah who continues to investigate human life history evolution. That began with ethnographic behavioral ecology in two hunter-gatherer communities where hunters fail daily but successes are bonanzas for all. Those findings suggested men’s risky hunting may be better explained as status competition than as paternal provisioning. Quantitative observations showed savanna hunter-gatherers’ day-to-day reliance on resources that infants and children are too small to acquire for themselves. In contrast, our great ape cousins rely on foods that infants pick and eat while still nursing. That contrast, combined with evolutionary theory to explain mammalian life history variation, highlighted the importance of Hadza grandmothers’ dependable foraging productivity. Their reliable subsidies for dependent juveniles allow mothers to bear next babies sooner. The same tradeoffs that modern Hadza face likely confronted ancestral hominin populations colonizing the expanding savannas in ancient Africa. Mathematical modeling to explore likely consequences shows that given mammalian regularities, great ape-like life histories plus grandmothers’ subsidies evolve human-like postmenopausal longevity, slower maturation, shorter birth intervals and male-biased sex ratios in the fertile ages. Initially aimed to explain the evolution of postmenopausal longevity, a grandmother hypothesis now helps explain other distinctly human features, including pair bonding, bigger brains, and preoccupation with engaging others that begins in infancy.
Hawkes received a BS from Iowa State, MA and PhD from the University of Washington in Cultural Anthropology, and a long (informal) postdoc in Evolutionary Ecology after joining the Utah Anthropology faculty. A member of the Scientific Executive Council of the Leakey Foundation, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Marc Kirschner | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | | |
Marc Kirschner is the John Franklin Enders University Professor at Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Prior to arriving at Harvard, he taught at Princeton University from 1972 to 1978 and the University of California, San Francisco from 1978 to 1993. In 1993, he moved to Harvard Medical School (HMS), where he served as the Chair of the new Department of Cell Biology for a decade. He became the Founding Chair of the HMS Department of Systems Biology in 2003.
Kirschner pioneered at least three fundamental and general concepts that help explain how biology organizes information spatially and temporally. He is a biochemist by training, but has always had a strong interest in using mathematics and physical principles to understand biology at a deeper level. In his game-changing research on the cytoskeleton, Kirschner discovered that microtubules explore space randomly and selectively reinforce productive connections, a concept at the crux of connectivity in the brain, angiogenesis, and many other processes. In his work on the cell cycle, he identified an autonomous oscillation that entrains the order of downstream events. The circadian clock and the vertebrate somite segmentation clock use similar principles. In frog embryo development, he found that a locally produced factor, FGF, provides instructions that induce a region of tissue to adopt a new fate; this discovery informed much of our understanding of developmental patterning. These seminal discoveries, and the technologies he developed to enable them, have been profoundly influential throughout biology and establish him as one of the great experimental biologists of all time. Kirschner has also been an advocate for federal biomedical research funding and served as first chair of the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy, a coalition of scientific societies he helped create in 1993 to educate the U.S. Congress on biomedical research and lobby for public funding of it.
Kirschner helped launch the monthly, peer-reviewed journal PLoS Biology in October 2003 as a member of the editorial board and senior author of a paper in the inaugural issue. He received the Richard Lounsbery Award in 1991, the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2001, the American Society for Cell Biology's E.B. Wilson Medal in 2003, Carnegie Mellon University's Dickson Prize for Science in 2004, and Technion's Harvey Prize in 2015, the American Society for Cell Biology's Public Service Award in 1996, the William C. Rose Award, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2001, the Rabbi Shai Shacknai Memorial Prize in Immunology and Cancer Research in 2003, and Carnegie Mellon University's Dickson Prize for Science in 2004. He was President of the American Society for Cell Biology from 1990 to 199. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1989, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1989, the Royal Society of London since 1999, and the Academia Europaea since 1999. Kirschner was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2021. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Trudy F. C. Mackay | | | Institution: | Clemson University | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 207. Genetics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Trudy Mackay received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Dalhousie University, Canada and her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. She has been a faculty member at the University of Edinburgh and North Carolina State University. Currently, she is the Director of the Center for Human Genetics, the Self Family Endowed Chair of Human Genetics and Professor of Genetics and Biochemistry at Clemson University. Her laboratory focuses on understanding the genetic and environmental factors affecting variation in quantitative traits, using Drosophila as a translational model system. Her laboratory seeks to identify the genetic loci at which segregating and mutational variation occurs, allelic effects and environmental sensitivities, and the causal molecular variants. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, the 2016 Wolf Prize Laureate for Agriculture and the 2018 Dawson Prize recipient, Trinity College, Dublin. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Gene E. Robinson | | | Institution: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 205. Microbiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Gene E. Robinson obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1986 and joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He holds a University Swanlund Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professorship, is interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (2020-2021), director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and director of the Bee Research Facility, and is a former director of the campus Neuroscience Program. Robinson pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior, led the effort to sequence the honey bee genome, authored or co-authored over 325 publications, and has trained 35 postdoctoral associates and 25 doctoral students, about half with faculty positions in academia. He served on the NIH National Institute of Mental Health Advisory Council, provided Congressional testimony, and has past and current appointments on scientific advisory boards for companies and foundations with significant interests in genomics. Dr. Robinson’s honors include: Fellow and Founders Memorial Award, Entomological Society of America; Fellow and Distinguished Behaviorist, Animal Behavior Society; Distinguished Scientist Award, International Behavioral Genetics Society; Guggenheim Fellowship; Fulbright Fellowship; NIH Pioneer Award; Honorary Doctorate, Hebrew University; Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences; Wolf Prize in Agriculture; member, US National Academy of Sciences; member US National Academy of Medicine; and member, American Philosophical Society. | |
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