Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Mary C. Beckerle | | | Institution: | Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Mary Beckerle, PhD, is CEO and Director of Huntsman Cancer Institute, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center that is a leader in Cancer Genetics and Precision Prevention. She is a Distinguished Professor of Biology, Associate Vice President for Cancer Affairs, and holds the prestigious Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah. Beckerle earned her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and completed post-doctoral research at the University of North Carolina. An internationally recognized scientist focused on fundamental aspects of Cancer Cell Biology, Beckerle’s research program has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health. Beckerle’s laboratory has made seminal contributions toward understanding cell adhesion and cell migration. In recent years her team has focused on the mechanisms involved in communicating information from the cell surface to the cytoskeleton and the nucleus. In 2000, Beckerle was appointed as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rothschild-Yvette Mayent Award Scholar at the Curie Institute in Paris. She received the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology in 2001, the Sword of Hope Award from the American Cancer Society in 2004, the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the University of Utah’s highest honor, in 2007, the 2018 Alfred G. Knudson Award in Cancer genetics, and the YWCA Utah 2018 Outstanding Achievement Award in Medicine and Health . Beckerle has served on numerous strategic planning and peer review committees for the National Institutes of Health. She is also a respected leader in science policy and practice, having served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology and on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research. She is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Medical Advisory Board and serves on the Board of Directors of both Huntsman Corporation and Johnson & Johnson. In 2016, Beckerle was selected as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel appointed to guide Vice President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, co-chairing the Precision revention and Early Detection Working Group. She is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the National Center for Biological Sciences in India, the Mechanobiology Institute in Singapore, and several National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers. Beckerle has been married to David Murrell since 1990; they have a son, David, who graduated from college in 2017. In addition to spending time with family and friends, Beckerle loves to cook, travel, garden, hike, and bike in the beautiful state of Utah. Mary Beckerle was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Sean B. Carroll | | | Institution: | University of Maryland; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 207. Genetics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1960 | | | | | | |
Sean B. Carroll is a scientist, writer, educator, and film producer. His laboratory research has centered on the genes that control animal body patterns and play major roles in the evolution of animal diversity. He has received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Sciences, been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017.
Sean is the author of several books for general audiences, including A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (2020), The Serengeti Rules, Brave Genius, The Making of the Fittest, Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Remarkable Creatures, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction. In 2016, Sean received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science.
Sean is currently Vice President, Science and Educational Media Group at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Head of HHMI’s Tangled Bank Studios. The architect of HHMI’s documentary film initiative, Sean has served as executive producer of nearly forty films, including the Emmy-winning The Farthest and The Serengeti Rules, and Oscar-nominated All That Breathes – the only documentary to win top honors at both Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals. In June 2018 he joined the University of Maryland's Department of Biology as the Andrew and Mary Balo and Nicholas and Susan Simon Endowed Chair. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Meave Leakey | | | Institution: | Stony Brook University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
I have always had an interest in natural history and rocks, a pastime much encouraged by my parents. After completing my Zoology degree at the University of North Wales in 1965, I was invited by Louis Leakey to work at the Tigoni Primate Research Centre outside Nairobi, Kenya. Here, in my limited spare time and under the supervision of the animal mechanics specialist Prof. McNeil Alexander, at the University of North Wales my limited spare time, I studied the forelimbs of modern cercopithecoids in the excellent collections of the research centre. I completed my PhD in 1968. In 1969, I began working with Richard Leakey exploring the extensive area of fossiliferous deposits on the eastern shores of Lake Turkana, northern Kenya, which at that time had never before been prospected for fossils or archaeological remains. The Koobi For a Research Project (KFRP) field research has continued to this day, initially under Richard Leakey, after 1989 under my leadership, and more recently co-led with my daughter Louise. The fifty years of fieldwork in the Turkana Basin, exploring the thousands of square kilometers of exposed fossiliferous sediments for evidence of origins of our past, has resulted in large paleontological collections documenting much of the Neogene, but is particularly well known for laying the foundation of our current knowledge of our own evolutionary past.
Today, together with Louise, I continue to direct the KFRP annual field expeditions. In 1995 the project recovered and named Australopithecus anamensis, the earliest known australopithecine, and the earliest secure evidence of bipedality. In 1999, we discovered and named Kenyanthropus platyops, showing diversity in humanity's past 3.5 million years ago. Sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the KFRP continues to recover new fossils showing diversity in the human family tree even earlier in time. Working with numerous colleagues from many disciplines, I have published widely. I am a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, a Research Professor at Stony Brook University and Director of Field Research at the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), an interdisciplinary research institute with stations to the east and west of Lake Turkana. In addition to promoting and facilitating research, TBI provides training and research opportunities, and brings employment and development benefits to local communities, while increasing awareness among the local people of their unique prehistoric heritage in this vast area. My awards include: The Academy of Achievements Award, USA in 2004, my election as an Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of London, 2011, as a Foreign Associate National Academy of Sciences 2013, and as a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences 2013. In 2014, I was awarded the National Geographic Society Hubbard Medal. A large part of my successes are due to the invaluable support and efforts of the hard working KFRP field crew, my many colleagues and my wonderful family.
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Meave Leakey is also the author of The Sediments of Time which was published in 2020. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Leif Andersson | | | Institution: | Uppsala University; Texas A&M University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Leif Andersson is the world’s leading authority on the genomic study of the origin and selected traits of domestic animals, and for his pioneering work he received the prestigious international Wolf Prize in 2014. He has repeatedly discovered what happens genetically when animal breeders apply artificial selection to domestic animals and choose particular traits for enhancement. These traits include fat deposition in pigs, the color of wattles and skin in chickens, and coat coloration and gait locomotion in horses. Genetic understanding has aided further selection programs. This work is the best modern manifestation of Charles Darwin’s pioneering study of Variation under Domestication. Truly Darwinian in outlook, Leif Andersson has expanded his genomic research program into problems of understanding evolution in nature, including the breeding of Baltic Sea herring, the size of rabbits, the peculiar mating system of a colorful shorebird, and size and shape of the beaks of Darwin’s finches. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Stuart H. Orkin | | | Institution: | Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Stuart Orkin has made pioneering achievements in defining the molecular basis of blood disorders and fundamental regulatory mechanisms governing the development of blood stem cells and blood lineages. His research is unmatched for its combined impact on our understanding of the genetic basis of blood diseases, the control of hematopoiesis, and the basis of the human fetal (HbF) to adult hemoglobin switch. He provided the first comprehensive molecular dissection of an inherited disorder, the thalassemia syndromes, and isolated the first regulator of blood cell development (GATA1). He identified the first disease gene (X-linked chronic granulomatous disease) through positional cloning. In the past decade, he defined how HbF is silenced in adult red cells starting with genome-wide association studies (GWAS) through to gene editing, work that forms the basis for therapeutic trials to reactivate HbF in thalassemia and sickle cell disease patients. His research is a paradigm for the application of molecular genetics to medicine. In 2018 he was the recipient of the Mecthild Esser Nemmers Prize in Medical Science, in 2020 he was awarded the King Faisal Prize in Medicine, and in 2021 he was awarded the 2021 Gruber Genetics Prize. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Neil H. Shubin | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1960 | | | | | | |
Neil Shubin is a scientist, administrator, and writer. Throughout his career, he has been interested in understanding the great transitions of evolution. Leading expeditions around the globe in search of critical intermediate fossils, he has discovered fossil evidence for the origins of terrestrial vertebrates, mammals, frogs, salamanders and other major groups of animals. He also has revealed genetic and developmental mechanisms for these changes by using comparative laboratory-based approaches on modern animals. Linking studies of gene sequence, regulation and function with those of embryology and anatomy, Shubin has revealed deep similarities among different organs that tell of their origins. Educated at Columbia, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, Shubin has held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he currently holds the Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professorship in Anatomy. He has held administrative positions at the University of Chicago (Departmental Chair, Associate Dean, and Senior Advisor to the President), The Field Museum (Provost) and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (Co-Director). He is the author of: Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within, and Some Assembly Required. The former won the Phi Betta Kappa Science Book Prize and the National Academy of Sciences Scientific Communication Award. Shubin has also received the Distinguished Explorer's Award of the Roy Chapman Andrews Society. Your Inner Fish appeared on PBS as a three-part miniseries. Produced by Tangled Bank Studios of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute it won numerous awards, in eluding an Emmy. Shubin is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
A pioneering neuroscientist and leader in biotechnology and higher education, Marc Tessier-Lavigne became Stanford University’s 11th president on September 1, 2016. He returned to Stanford after serving for five years as president of The Rockefeller University, a leading graduate biomedical research university. Prior to his time in New York, he spent more than two decades in the Bay area. From 2001 to 2005, he served on the Stanford faculty as a professor of biological sciences and held the Susan B. Ford Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences. While at Stanford, he was recruited to Genentech, where he served as Executive Vice President for Research and Chief Scientific Officer, directing 1,400 scientists in disease research and drug discovery for cancer and other illnesses. Prior to Stanford, he served on the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he was recognized for distinguished teaching and ground-breaking discoveries on brain development. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including being elected a member of the National Academies of Sciences and of Medicine. President Tessier-Lavigne earned undergraduate degrees from McGill University and from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph.D. from University College London. He performed postdoctoral work there and at Columbia University. | |
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