| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Paul C. Mangelsdorf | | | Institution: | University of North Carolina | | | Year Elected: | 1955 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1899 | | | Death Date: | 7/22/89 | | | | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. Eve Marder | | | Institution: | Brandeis University | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. William T. Newsome | | | Institution: | Stanford University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
William T. Newsome is Harman Family Provostial Professor, Vincent V. C. Woo Director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University. In 2013 he was enlisted to co-lead the working group for President Obama's $100 million BRAIN initiative.
Studying the primate visual system with a combination of behavioral, electrophysiological, and computational techniques, William Newsome has provided a deep understanding of the neural mechanisms mediating basic cognitive functions, including motion perception and decision. The most compelling evidence for the relationship between the response of individual neurons and perception has come from Newsome’s work. Newsome and colleagues recorded the activity of motion selective neurons in area MT in alert monkeys while the animals carried out a task designed to report the direction of motion in a random dot display. They found that the firing of most neurons in this task correlated extremely well with the performance of the monkey. Thus, directional information encoded by the neurons of a single column in MT is sufficient to account for the subject’s judgment. They then found that stimulation altered the animal’s judgment, biasing judgments toward the particular direction of motion encoded by the neurons that were stimulated. Thus, the firing of a relatively small population of motion sensitive neurons in MT, perhaps as few as 200, directly contributes to perception.
He earned his Ph.D. in 1980 from the California Institute of Technology. He has won a number of awards, including the W. Alden Spencer Award from Columbia University in 1994, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 2002, and the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society in 2010. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and the American Philosophical Society in 2011. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Ardem Patapoutian | | | Institution: | Scripps Research Institute; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1967 | | | | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner | | | Institution: | University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1998 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Stanley B. Prusiner, M.D., is Director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases and Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco where he has worked since 1972. He received his undergraduate and medical training at the University of Pennsylvania and his postgraduate clinical training at UCSF. From 1969-72, he served in the U.S. Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health. Editor of 12 books and author of over 350 research articles, Prusiner's contributions to scientific research have been internationally recognized. Dr. Prusiner discovered an unprecedented class of pathogens that he named prions. Prions are infectious proteins that cause neurodegenerative diseases in animals and humans. Dr. Prusiner discovered a novel disease paradigm when he showed prions cause disorders in humans that can be manifest as (1) sporadic, (2) inherited and (3) infectious illnesses. Dr. Prusiner demonstrated that prions are formed when a normal, benign cellular protein acquires an altered shape. Dr. Prusiner's proposals of multiple shapes or conformations for a single protein as well as the concept of an infectious protein were considered heretical. Prior to Dr. Prusiner's discoveries, proteins were thought to possess only one biologically active conformation. Remarkably, the more common neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases have been found over the past two decades to be, like the prion diseases, disorders of protein processing. Prusiner is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and is a foreign member of the Royal Society, London. He is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer's Disease Research from the American Academy of Neurology (1991); the Richard Lounsberry Award for Extraordinary Scientific Research in Biology and Medicine from the National Academy of Sciences (1993); the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1993); the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1994); the Paul Ehrlich Prize from the Federal Republic of Germany (1995); the Wolf Prize in Medicine from the State of Israel (1996); the Keio International Award for Medical Science (1996); the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (1997); the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1997); and the National Medal of Science (2010). Prusiner holds 50 issued or allowed United States patents all of which are assigned to the University of California. His memoir, Madness and Memory, was published in 2014. | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Kenneth B. Raper | | | Year Elected: | 1958 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1908 | | | Death Date: | 1/16/87 | | | | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. Carla J. Shatz | | | Institution: | Stanford University | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Carla Shatz conducts basic research in brain development and function that helps lead to a better understating of neurological disorders such as cerebral palsy, epilepsy and dyslexia, as well as learning and memory. She studies how neural signaling - first in the womb and later from what our senses pick up - sculpts and reinforces proper brain circuits as they form between nerve cells in the eye and brain. Dr. Shatz graduated from Radcliffe College in 1969 with a B.A. in chemistry and then won a Marshall Scholarship to study physiology at University College London. She was awarded a Harvard Junior Fellowship at Harvard Medical School, where she received a Ph.D. in neurobiology in 1976. In 1978 Dr. Shatz established her own lab at Stanford University where she became Professor of Neurobiology. In 1992, she moved to the University of California, Berkeley as professor and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical School, then to Harvard Medical School as Nathan March Pusey Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurobiology. In 2007 she returned to Stanford as the Director of BioX. Her work has gained her numerous honors, including the Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in Health and Education (1995), the Alcon Award for Outstanding Contributions for Vision Research (1997), the Bernard Sachs Award from the Child Neurology Society (1999), the Weizman Women and Science Award (2000), the Mortimer D. Sackler, M.D., Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Developmental Psychobiology (2013), the Gruber Prize (2015), and the Kavli Neuroscience Prize (2016). Her expertise on brain development and learning has led to service on many advisory panels including the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning in 1997. In 1992, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in 1995 to the National Academy of Sciences, in 1997 to the American Philosophical Society, and in 1999 to the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Shatz is past president (1994-1995) of the 28,000 member Society for Neuroscience and served on the Council of the National Academy of Sciences from 1998-2001. | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Eric M. Shooter | | | Institution: | Stanford University School of Medicine | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | Death Date: | March 21, 2018 | | | | | | |
Eric M. Shooter received a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1950. He worked at the Stanford University School of Medicine starting in 1968, serving as professor of genetics and professor of biochemistry (1968-75), chairman of the neurosciences Ph.D. program (1972-82) and chairman of neurobiology (1975-87). Dr. Shooter was known for his research on the isolation, characterization, and mechanism of action of nerve growth factor (NGF) and his identification and study of the gene responsible for the major inherited disease of the human peripheral nervous system, Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) 1A disease. He was the first to show that NGF and the neurotrophins mediate their actions through two distinct receptors and how these receptors cooperate in these processes, as well as identifying key genes, induced by NGF, that are important regulators of axonal growth. Dr. Shooter showed that the gene mediating CMT1A disease codes for a new myelin protein, PMP22, and that demyelination of peripheral nerves occurs because mutations in, or duplications of, this gene lead to aberrant trafficking of PMP22 in the Schwann cell. His discovery of this gene has led to the identification of other myelin genes involved in CMT diseases and laid the groundwork for understanding both the genetic basis of these diseases and their underlying mechanisms. Dr. Shooter received the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award in 1992, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize of the Society for Neuroscience in 1995, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Neuroscience Research in 1997. He was a member of the Royal Society of London and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. Eric M. Shooter died March 21, 2018 at the age of 93. | |
| 29 | Name: | Dr. Solomon H. Snyder | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 1992 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Solomon H. Snyder received his undergraduate and medical training at Georgetown University and his psychiatric training at The Johns Hopkins University (JHU). In 1966, he joined the staff of the Department of Pharmacology at JHU's School of Medicine. Presently he is Distinguished Service Professor of Neuroscience, Psychiatry, and Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Dr. Snyder's identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs and elucidation of the actions of psychotropic agents. He pioneered the labeling of receptors by reversible ligand binding in the identification of opiate receptors and extended this technique for all the major neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. In characterizing each new group of receptors, he also elucidated actions of major neuroactive drugs. The isolation and subsequent cloning of receptor proteins stems from the ability to label, and thus monitor, receptors by these ligand binding techniques. The application of Dr. Snyder's techniques has enhanced the development of new agents in the pharmaceutical industry by enabling rapid screening of large numbers of candidate drugs. Dr. Snyder is the recipient of numerous professional honors including the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research (1978), the Wolf Foundation Prize in Medicine (1983), the Franklin Institute's Bower Award (1991), the Albany Prize in Medicine (2007), and the National Medal of Science (2004). He is the author of more than 900 journal articles and several books including Uses of Marijuana (1971), Madness and the Brain (1974), The Troubled Mind (1976), Biological Aspects of Abnormal Behavior (1980), Drugs and the Brain (1986) and Brainstorming (1989). Dr. Snyder was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1992. | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Larry R. Squire | | | Institution: | University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 1998 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Larry R. Squire is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology at the University of California School of Medicine, San Diego, and Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did postdoctoral study at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine before coming to UCSD. Dr. Squire investigates the organization and neurological foundations of memory. His work involves the study of neurological patients, healthy volunteers, and rodents and combines the traditions of cognitive science and neuroscience. His publications include approximately 400 research articles and two books: Memory and Brain (1987) and Memory: From Mind to Molecules (with Eric Kandel, 2nd Edition, 2008). He is Editor-in-Chief of the textbook Fundamental Neuroscience (3rd Edition) and The Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. He served as President of the Society for Neuroscience and is also a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the William Middleton Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievements in Health, the McGovern Award, the Metropolitan Life Award, the Herbert Crosby Warren Medal, and the American Philosophical Society’s Karl Lashley Award. Dr. Squire was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1998. | |
| 31 | 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. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Leslie B. Vosshall | | | Institution: | Rockefeller University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1965 | | | | | | |
Leslie B. Vosshall is the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at The Rockefeller University. In 2022, she became the Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), where she had been an Investigator since 2008. She earned her Ph.D. at The Rockefeller University in 1993. She was previously an Annenberg Assistant Professor, Head of the laboratory and Chemers Family Associate Professor at the Rockefeller University, and a faculty member at the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Vosshall is known for her strong impact on public health and extraordinary contributions to the scientific community. Female mosquitoes bite humans to obtain blood to nurture eggs, thereby transmitting viral pathogens including dengue and Zika to hundreds of millions of people each year. Over the past decade, Vosshall single-handedly built the yellow fever mosquito Aedes Aegypti into a genetic model organism for neurobiology and provided key insights into the sensory mechanisms these deadly insects use to hunt humans. She elucidated the mechanism of action of insect repellents and developed small molecules that disrupt mosquito biting behavior and show great promise in reducing disease transmission. Vosshall is a strong proponent of open access publications and pre-prints and fostering diversity in science.
She was the 2002 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the 2008 Lawrence C. Katz Prize from Duke University, the 2010 DART/NYU Biotechnology Award, the 2011 Gill Young Investigator Award, the 2020 National Academy of Sciences Pradel Research Award, and the co-recipient of the 2020 Alden W. Spencer Award with Kristin Scott. Vosshall is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015 and the National Academy of Medicine in 2021. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. Torsten Nils Wiesel | | | Institution: | Rockefeller University | | | Year Elected: | 1982 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | | | | |
Torsten Wiesel is a native of Sweden where he received an M.D. degree from the Karolinska Institute in 1954. In 1955, he joined the Johns Hopkins Medical School and in 1958 was named assistant professor in opthalmic physiology. In 1959, he joined Harvard Medical School and became Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology. He became the Robert Winthrop Professor in 1973. Dr. Wiesel's pioneering studies of the mammalian visual cortex have shaped current understanding of brain structure, function and development. Dr. Wiesel, with his long-time collaborator, Dr. David Hubel, received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. In 1983, he joined Rockefeller University as Head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and was named the Vincent and Brooke Astor Professor. He became the seventh President of Rockefeller University in 1992 and President Emeritus and Director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior in 1998. Dr. Wiesel is a member of The National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Society. He has received numerous awards and prizes, including the 2012 Distinguished Service Award from the Hospital for Special Surgery, as well as honorary degrees from universities in the United States and Europe. Recently he received the nation's highest honor in science: the 2005 National Medal of Science. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1982. | |
| |