APS Member History

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1	Name:	Dr. Ruth Arnon
	Institution:	The Weizmann Institute of Science
	Year Elected:	2009
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	209. Neurobiology
	Residency:	International
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1933

	Prof. Arnon joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1960. Prior to her appointment as Vice-President, she served as Head of the Department of Chemical Immunology, and as Dean of the Faculty of Biology. From 1985 to 1994, she was the Director of the Institute's MacArthur Center for Molecular Biology of Tropical Diseases. Prof. Arnon has made significant contributions to the fields of vaccine development, cancer research and to the study of parasitic diseases. Along with Prof. Michael Sela and Dr. Dvora Teitelbaum she developed Copaxone,® a drug for the treatment of multiple sclerosis which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and is presently marketed in the USA, Canada the EU, Australia and many other countries worldwide. Prof. Arnon is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences, and serves as its Vice-President since 2004. On the world scene, she is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). She has served as President of the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS), and as Secretary-General of the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS), as well as in the European Union Research Advisory Board (EURAB). Her awards include the Robert Koch Prize in Medical Sciences, Spain's Jiminez Diaz Memorial Prize, France's Legion of Honor, the Hadassah World Organization's Women of Distinction Award, the Wolf Prize for Medicine, the Rothschild Prize for Biology, and the Israel Prize, Honorary degree – Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, The AESKU Prize for Life Contribution to Autoimmunity by the 6th International Congress on Autoimmunity, “Yakir” Tel-Hai Academic College, Israel, Elected to the American Philosophical Society. Prof. Arnon is also the Scientific Advisor to the President of the State of Israel. Prof. Arnon is the incumbent of the Paul Ehrlich Chair in Immunochemistry.

2	Name:	Dr. Nina G. Jablonski
	Institution:	Pennsylvania State University
	Year Elected:	2009
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1953

	Nina G. Jablonski: Short Biographical Sketch I was born and raised in upstate New York, and owe my interest in natural history to my upbringing on a farm. I was inspired to pursue a career in the study of human evolution by documentary accounts of the famed paleontologist, Louis Leakey, who recovered important fossils of ancient humans at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. I completed an A. B. at Bryn Mawr College with a major in biology in 1975, and then went on to complete a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Washington in 1981. I have always had an insatiable interest in reconstructing the lifestyles and appearance of extinct animals, including our ancestors. My research has focused on primate and human evolution, and in particular, on the role that changing environments have played in shaping the adaptations of primates and humans through time. I studied the anatomy and evolution of a lineage of Old World monkeys for my dissertation, and have maintained and expanded that research to consider the evolution of the whole group in relation to changes in the physical and biotic environment through time. I have been fortunate to be able to participate in paleontological field work in eastern Africa and many parts of southern and eastern Asia. I have a current paleontological field project in Yunnan Province in southwestern China that involves the exploration of a late Miocene primate-bearing site. In contrast to many of my colleagues, I enjoy the study of important aspects of primate and human evolution that are not recorded in the fossil record, including the evolution of skin. This research is challenging because it requires drawing upon diverse bodies of evidence, from anatomy and physiology to epidemiology and climatology in order to try to determine why and how evolution took the course that it did. I became interested in the specific problem of the evolution of human skin color quite by accident when, in 1991, I was asked by a colleague to give a lecture on skin. Realizing that little was known about why skin color variation existed in humans and that new data existed to shed light on the mystery, I embarked on what I thought would be a short excursion into this area of research. Nearly 20 years and many serendipitous discoveries later, the biological and social meaning of skin color has grown to be one of the main foci of research, because of its many ramifications for human health and the quality of human interactions. My research on the evolution of human skin and skin color has been done mostly in collaboration with my husband, George Chaplin. Together we have demonstrated that skin color is the product of natural selection acting to regulate levels of melanin pigment in the skin relative to levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in the environment. Melanin is a natural sunscreen that prevents the breakdown of certain essential biomolecules (in particular, the B vitamin folate, and DNA), while permitting enough UVR to enter the skin to promote the production of essential vitamin D. This research led to my being awarded in 2005 one of the first Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowships ("Guggenheims for race"), in addition to the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. I am committed to bringing science to the public. In 2006, I published the book, Skin: A Natural History (University of California Press), that examined the evolutionary history and cultural importance of skin. I am now working on another book, on the biological and social meaning of skin color. In addition to books and popular articles, I enjoy giving lectures and interviews on human evolution. Many of these are now available in various formats on the internet. I have also collaborated on many scientific documentaries on human and primate evolution for American, European, and Asian television networks. In 2023, Nina Jablonski becaame an Atherton Professor and Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Pennsylvania State University.

3	Name:	Dr. Yuet Wai Kan
	Institution:	University of California, San Francisco
	Year Elected:	2009
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1936

	Yuet Wai Kan is a graduate of the University of Hong Kong Medical School and is at present the Louis K. Diamond Professor of Hematology at the University of California, San Francisco. He has served on many organizations including as the President of the American Society of Hematology (1990) and currently as Chairman of the Croucher Foundation in Hong Kong that supports science and technology in Hong Kong. He works in the fields of hematology and genetics, and his research led to the innovation of DNA diagnosis that has found wide applications in many human conditions. In recognition of his contributions, he has been elected a member of learned science academies in the United States, Great Britain, Taiwan and China. He has received several honorary degrees and many national awards, including the Lasker Award for Medical Research (1991), international awards from Canada, Italy and Switzerland, and most recently the Shaw Prize in Life Sciences and Medicine from Hong Kong (2004). He was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine in 2011.

4	Name:	Dr. Rowena G. Matthews
	Institution:	University of Michigan
	Year Elected:	2009
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1938

	Rowena G. Matthews is the G. Robert Greenberg Distinguished University Professor of Biological Chemistry and a Research Professor and Charter Faculty Member, Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. She is an internationally recognized authority on the role of folate- and B12-dependent enzymes in homocysteine metabolism and their relevance to disease. Her discoveries define the biochemical basis for establishing guidelines for folate levels in human nutrition. Matthews has also played a major role in the formulation of science policy both nationally and internationally. She was a member of an international advisory panel for the Advanced Study Institutes of NATO from 1994-96, served on the Council of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 1991-94, and participated in the activities of the Federal Science Policy Committee on Science of the House of Representatives. Additionally, she won the 2000 William A. Rose Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the 2001 Repligen Award, from the American Chemistry Society. She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2002 and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2005.

5	Name:	Dr. Craig C. Mello
	Institution:	University of Massachusetts Medical School; Howard Hughes Medical Institute
	Year Elected:	2009
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1960

	Craig C. Mello is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Dr. Mello and his colleague Andrew Fire, Ph.D., of Stanford University, received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), a natural gene silencing mechanism triggered by double-stranded RNA. RNAi provides both a powerful research tool for knocking out the expression of specific genes and opens a totally unanticipated window on gene regulation. Dr. Mello holds a B.S. in biochemistry from Brown University and a Ph.D. in cellular and developmental biology from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before joining University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1994.

6	Name:	Dr. Robert Tjian
	Institution:	University of California, Berkeley; Howard Hughes Medical Institute
	Year Elected:	2009
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	201. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1949

	Robert Tjian served as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in April 2009 through the end of 2016 and then returned to his lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Trained as a biochemist, he has made major contributions to the understanding of how genes work during three decades on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He was named an HHMI investigator in 1987. Tjian studies the biochemical steps involved in controlling how genes are turned on and off, key steps in the process of decoding the human genome. He discovered proteins called transcription factors that bind to specific sections of DNA and play a critical role in controlling how genetic information is transcribed and translated into the thousands of biomolecules that keep cells, tissues, and organisms alive. Tjian's laboratory has illuminated the relationship between disruptions in the process of transcription and human diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and Huntington's. More recently, he has begun studying how transcription factors control the differentiation of embryonic stem cells into muscle, liver, and neurons. Tjian, 59, was born in Hong Kong, the youngest of nine children. His family fled China before the Communist Revolution and eventually settled in New Jersey. Known as a voracious consumer of scientific information and data, Tjian famously talked his way into the biochemistry laboratory of the late Daniel Koshland as a Berkeley undergraduate—even though he had never taken a single course in the subject. Tjian went on to receive a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Berkeley in 1971 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with James Watson, he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1979. At Berkeley, Tjian assumed a variety of leadership roles, including spearheading a major campus initiative to support and implement new paradigms for bioscience teaching and research. He served as the Director of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center, and the Faculty Director of the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has received many awards honoring his scientific contributions, including the Alfred P. Sloan Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. He was named California Scientist of the Year in 1994. As president of the Institute, Tjian remains an active scientist. His small laboratory group at HHMI's Janelia Farm Research Campus is focused on the development of new approaches to image biochemical activities in single living cells. He will also maintain a research laboratory at UC Berkeley, where he is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. Tjian and his wife, Claudia, an attorney, have two daughters.

7	Name:	Dr. James W. Valentine
	Institution:	University of California, Berkeley
	Year Elected:	2009
	Class:	2. Biological Sciences
	Subdivision:	203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1926
	Death Date:	April 7, 2023

	James W. Valentine is the Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and the Faculty Curator Emeritus at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. He previously taught at the University of Missouri, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. James Valentine has made important contributions to evolutionary history by combining paleontology with data from genetics, zoology, botany and other life sciences. He conducted groundbreaking research on the Cambrian Explosion and was among the first paleontologists to use molecular data to investigate the origin of major Metazoan body plans. His papers with Eldridge Moores are among the foundation documents in the plate tectonics revolution and helped establish the University of California, Davis geology department as a leader in the field. In his seminal work Evolutionary Paleoecology of the Marine Biosphere, Valentine employs a hierarchical approach to integrate studies on the environmental and climatic factors that have regulated biotic diversity, and he continues these studies today. A dedicated scholar of the life and work of Charles Darwin, Valentine has built a collection of virtually every edition of Charles Darwin in every language, including 26 of 29 British first editions. He was awarded the Paleontology Society Medal in 1996. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.