Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Catherine Dulac | | | Institution: | Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1963 | | | | | | |
Catherine Dulac is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Her work explores the identity and function of neural circuits underlying instinctive social behaviors in mice, and the role of genomic imprinting in the adult and developing brain. She grew up in Montpellier, France, graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and received her PhD from the University of Paris VI. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and joined the faculty of Harvard as a junior faculty in 1996, before becoming full professor in 2001, and Chair of Harvard's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology from 2007 until 2013. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and of the French Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a recipient of multiple awards including the Richard Lounsbery Award, the National Academy’s Pradel Research Award, the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society, and the 2021 Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Erin K. O'Shea | | | Institution: | Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1965 | | | | | | |
Erin O’Shea is president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a top biomedical philanthropy. HHMI is known for driving science forward by investing in scientists, educators and students with the potential to make transformative change. O’Shea is the first woman to lead HHMI.
A leader in the scientific fields of gene regulation, signal transduction, and systems biology, O’Shea maintains a research lab at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. She previously served as the Institute’s Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer and has been an HHMI investigator since 2000.
Prior to joining HHMI, O’Shea was the director of Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology and its Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemistry and Chemical Biology. O’Shea has also served on the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco. She earned a PhD in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Smith College.
O’Shea is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology. In 2017, Washingtonian magazine named her "one of Washington’s 100 most powerful women." | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Laurie H. Glimcher | | | Institution: | Dana Farber Cancer Institute; Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Laurie H. Glimcher is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Richard and Susan Smith Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She earned her M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1976, where she spent most of her career, including as Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology.
Laurie Glimcher has elucidated the molecular pathways that regulate the development and activation of cells in the immune system - pathways critical for both the development of protective immunity and for the pathophysiologic immune responses underlying autoimmune, infectious, allergic, and malignant diseases. She discovered the first Th1-specific transcription factor, T-bet, and demonstrated that it is the master-regulator of Type 1 immunity in cells of both the adaptive and innate immune system. She also discovered XBP1, the first transcription factor required for both plasma cell differentiation and the Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) Stress Response. She then demonstrated a link between ER stress and proinflammatory/autoimmune diseases. Most recently she discovered that XBP1 is key in the maintenance of cancer stem cells in triple negative breast cancer. Further, IRE1/XBP1 also controls anti-tumor immunity by disrupting dendritic cell homeostasis. Hence reducing IRE1/XBP1 activity should simultaneously inhibit tumor cell growth and activate type 1 anti-tumor immunity.
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1996), the National Academy of Sciences (2002), and the American Association of Immunologists, (president, 2003-04). Laurie Glimcher was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Gary Ruvkun | | | Institution: | Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 207. Genetics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Gary Ruvkun is currently Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Hans-Hermann Schoene Distinguished Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982.
Gary Ruvkun discovered, with Victor Ambros, that small non-coding RNAs play a central role in eukaryotic gene regulation. Prior to this discovery it was universally assumed that the regulation of gene expression was controlled entirely by proteins. The discovery of a whole new layer of regulation mediated by what are now known as micro-RNAs has revolutionized thinking about regulatory mechanisms. Ruvkun’s genetic studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of micro-RNA biogenesis and action. In a second major advance, Ruvkun and Cynthia Kenyon provided the first convincing evidence that organismal aging is controlled by genetic programs, thereby opening a new approach to the study of aging. Finally, Ruvkun has studied how organisms respond to toxins, showing that it is not individual compounds that are recognized but rather their toxic effects, such as slower protein synthesis. Detection of toxicity then leads to a multi-faceted response aimed at countering the toxic insult.
Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, 2008; Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, 2015. Author: (B. Reinhart et al.) “The 21 nucleotide let-7 RNA regulates developmental timing in C. elegans,” Nature, 2000; (A. Pasquinelli et al.) “Conservation of the sequence and temporal expression of let-7 heterochronic regulatory RNA,” Nature, 2000; (Y. Liu et al.) “Caenorhabditis elegans pathways that surveil and defend mitochondria,” Nature, 2014. National Academy of Sciences, 2008; National Academy of Medicine, 2009; American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2009. Gary Ruvkun was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Clifford J. Tabin | | | Institution: | Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Dr. Cliff Tabin obtained his Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, where he made one of the first retroviral vectors and also first identified the activating mutation in the ras oncogene, in the laboratory of Robert Weinberg. Dr. Tabin began his work in developmental biology during a brief postdoc in the laboratory of Doug Melton at Harvard University, before leaving a year later for a position as an independent Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. There he began studying limb regeneration and development in an effort to bring modern molecular tools to classical embryological systems, work he continued when he joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1989. His lab is responsible for the first use of retroviral vectors for gene transfer into developing chick embryos, opening that system for genetic manipulations. Focusing on the genetic basis of pattern formation and morphogenesis, his lab has worked on a range of developmental problems, including contributions to our understanding of limb development, the isolation of Sonic hedgehog as a key developmental morphogen, the discovery of the first genes involved in regulating left-right asymmetry in the embryo and elucidation of the role of physical forces in shaping the gut. He has also examined the way developmental pathways are modulated through evolution to produce different morphologies such as in the generation of distinct beaks in different species of Darwin’s Finches, enlarged legs in hopping rodents called jerboas, and metabolic evolution in cave fish | |
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