Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Ronald M. Fairman | | | Institution: | Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Ronald Fairman, an internationally acclaimed vascular surgeon, has played a central role in shaping an entirely new field of medicine, endovascular therapy. This field has virtually transformed and vastly improved the care of patients afflicted with blood vessel disorders such as aneurysms of the thoracic and abdominal aorta and blockage of arteries such as the carotid, renal and femoral. Fairman has been a pioneer in endovascular surgery. In this new treatment complex devices are inserted via catheters into peripheral arteries and with radiographic imaging advanced centrally to stent or seal off aortic aneurysms or to open and restore flow to narrowed or occluded arteries. Thus, intricate but less invasive procedures are substituted for major or more dangerous ones such as open operations to remove aneurysms or bypass arterial occlusions. Fairman’s research has developed, tested and improved endovascular procedures and the complex devices necessary for their conduct. Each new device must be subjected to extensive evaluation and clinical testing before it can be approved by the FDA. Approval can only be accomplished by demonstrated safety and effectiveness in well designed clinical trials. Fairman is at the forefront of these multi-institutional national trials, serving as the principal investigator, a major participant or advisor to the FDA on dozens of them.
Members may recall his presentation of this work to the Society at its April 2015 Meeting. The results of these trials and other aspects of his clinical experience has been reported by Fairman in more than 140 peer reviewed publications in scientific journals, dozens of chapters and editorials and in lectures and visiting professorships around the world. He is a member of the editorial boards of four vascular journals. In 2014 he received the highest award from the Society for Vascular Surgery and in 2016 he will serve as its president | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Ann M. Graybiel | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Ann Martin Graybiel and coworkers pioneered understanding of the basal ganglia, brain structures related to movement and emotion that are disordered in neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders. Relatively little was known about the neurobiology of these structures until Graybiel and her students discovered the structural architecture of the striatum, a physical design now known to underpin the organization of genes and neurotransmitters, including dopamine, linked to Parkinson’s disease. By training animals to learn habits, she and her group discovered neural activity templates for habit learning in the striatum and found that distinct activity patterns uniquely characterize different motor and emotion-related regions. Graybiel and students now are finding that these templates can be modified by circuit intervention, opening the possibility of new therapeutic approaches to disorders of movement and emotion. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Carol W. Greider | | | Institution: | University of California Santa Cruz | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | | | |
Carol Greider, Ph.D. received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, working together with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, she discovered telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomeres, or chromosome ends. In 1988, Dr. Greider was recruited to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an independent Cold Spring Harbor Fellow, where she cloned and characterized the RNA component of telomerase. In 1990, Dr. Greider was appointed as an assistant investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, followed later by appointment to Investigator in 1994. She expanded the focus of her telomere research to include the role of short telomeres in cellular senescence, cell death and in cancer. In 1997, Dr. Greider moved her laboratory to the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 2003, she was appointed as the Daniel Nathans Professor and Director of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. Dr. Greider’s group continued to study the biochemistry of telomerase and determined the secondary structure of the human telomerase RNA. In addition, she characterized the loss of telomere function in mice, which allowed an understanding of human diseases that make up the short telomere syndromes. Dr. Greider shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 with Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres and telomerase. In 2014, Dr. Greider was appointed as a Blooomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Greider directs a group of scientists studying both the role of short telomeres in age-related disease and cancer as well as the regulatory mechanism that maintain telomere length. In 2020 she became Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental (MCD) Biology at University of California Santa Cruz. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Eric Knudsen | | | Institution: | Stanford University School of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Dr. Knudsen received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 1976. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology in 1979. He joined the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University as an assistant professor in 1979, became a full professor in 1988, and served as Chair of the Department from 2000-2005. He is currently the Sewall Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research has focused on how the central nervous system processes information, how it learns from experience, and how it selects information for attention and decision-making. Dr. Knudsen has received a number of honors and awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Society’s Karl Spencer Lashley Award in 2008 "for his comprehensive study of visual and auditory perception in the owl and for his elucidation of how the auditory map is calibrated by the visual system during development." He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Michael A. Marletta | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Michael A. Marletta is on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he holds the CH and Annie Li Chair in the Molecular Biology of Diseases. He is also Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at Berkeley. Marletta is a biochemist whose creative work begins with a dissection of a biological question into a molecular framework for study. His primary research interests lie at the interface of chemistry and biology with emphasis on the study of protein function and enzyme reaction mechanisms. His work has demonstrated uncommon creativity and led to remarkable discoveries when asking chemical questions about complex biological phenomena. His work on the enzymes nitric oxide synthase and guanylate cyclase provided many of the fundamental details of nitric oxide signaling that have now become a paradigm for cellular communication involving gases. He has also discovered novel enzymes involved in biomass degradation that also play a role in pathogenesis in humans and plants. Marletta has been recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship (1995), election to the National Academy of Medicine (1999), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), and the National Academy of Sciences (2006). He has received many awards that recognize his accomplishments including the Harrison Howe Award (2004), the Repligen Award for Chemistry of Biological Processes given by the Biological Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society (2007), the Emil T. Kaiser Award from the Protein Society (2007), the Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest, Northeastern Section, American Chemical Society (2007), the American Association of State Colleges and Universities AASCU Distinguished Alumnus Award (2014), the Alfred Bader Award for Bioinorganic/Bioorganic Chemistry (2015), and the UCSF 150th Anniversary Alumni Excellence Award (2015). Marletta serves on editorial boards including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA and is a member of the Foundation Board at Fredonia, State University of New York. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Allan Spradling | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Carnegie Institution for Science | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan Allan Spradling studied mathematics and physics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Switching to biology at MIT, where he earned his PhD. in 1975, Spradling used Drosophila polytene chromosomes as genome arrays to study transcription, and found that heat shock causes a universal genetic response.
Spradling began a long fascination with the ovary during a postdoctoral stint at Indiana University, where he discovered that Drosophila eggshell genes undergo amplification during follicle development. In 1980 he joined the faculty at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore, and two years later he and colleague Gerry Rubin showed how transposable elements can be used to introduce DNA into the . Unlike contemporary transformation methods in other animals, Drosophila genes introduced in transposons functioned normally, allowing cognate genetic defects to be cured and developmental gene regulation to be studied. Remaining at Carnegie, Spradling was appointed an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1988, and Director in 1994. Spradling’s group developed methods for using single transposon insertions to isolate and manipulate Drosophila genes. These efforts initiated the Drosophila Gene Disruption Project, whose freely distributed strains have facilitated Drosophila research worldwide.
The basic biological and genetic mechanisms that make multicellular animals possible are turning out to be largely the same in all species. Studying model organisms lays the groundwork for deciphering how mammalian cells and tissues develop and operate. For example, Spradling’s group analyzed the basic biology of tissue stem cells, and in 2000 characterized the first stem cell niche. Recently, his lab showed that mammalian oocytes are constructed like Drosophila oocytes, using materials transported from sister germ cells, which thereby act as "nurse cells." Indeed, egg production from beginning to end is turning out to be much more highly conserved than originally anticipated.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) since 1989, and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences since 1991, Spradling has been awarded many prizes for his work. These include the NAS Molecular Biology Award (jointly with Gerry Rubin). He also received the E.J. Conklin Award of the Society for Developmental Biology and the G.W. Beadle Award of the Genetics Society of America. Spradling also received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was the 2008 winner of the Gruber Prize in Genetics. | |
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