Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Andrew Balmford | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 205. Microbiology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1963 | | | | | | |
Andrew Balmford is Professor of Conservation Science in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, where his research focuses on how to reconcile biodiversity conservation with meeting human food needs and other land-demanding activities, and on the costs and benefits of retaining intact ecosystems. He collaborates closely with conservation practitioners and with colleagues in other disciplines including economics, agriculture and psychology. Andrew helped establish the Student Conference on Conservation Science, the Cambridge Conservation Forum, Earth Optimism, and most recently the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits. In his book ‘Wild Hope’ - which has since inspired a TV series - he argues that cautious, evidence-based optimism is vital in tackling environmental challenges. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. William G. Kaelin | | | Institution: | Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1957 | | | | | | |
William Kaelin is the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Dana- Farber Cancer Institute, Senior Physician-Scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He obtained his undergraduate and M.D. degrees from Duke University and completed his training in Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he served as chief medical resident. He was a clinical fellow in Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and later a postdoctoral fellow in David Livingston’s laboratory, during which time he was a McDonnell Scholar.
A Nobel Laureate, Dr. Kaelin received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and the American College of Physicians. He previously served on the National Cancer Institute Board of Scientific Advisors, the AACR Board of Trustees, and the Institute of Medicine National Cancer Policy Board. He is a recipient of the Paul Marks Prize for cancer research from the Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center; the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Prize from the AACR; the Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist award; the 2010 Canada International Gairdner Award; ASCI’s Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award; the Scientific Grand Prix of the Foundation Lefoulon-Delalande; the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences; the Steven C. Beering Award; the AACR Princess Takamatsu Award; the ASCO Science of Oncology Award; the Helis Award; the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Prize; the Massry Prize; the Harriet P. Dustan Award for Science as Related to Medicine from the American College of Physicians.
Dr. Kaelin’s research seeks to understand how, mechanistically, mutations affecting tumor- suppressor genes cause cancer. His laboratory is currently focused on studies of the VHL, RB-1, and p53 tumor suppressor genes. His long-term goal is to lay the foundation for new anticancer therapies based on the biochemical functions of such proteins. His work on the VHL protein helped to motivate the eventual successful clinical testing of VEGF inhibitors for the treatment of kidney cancer. Moreover, this line of investigation led to new insights into how cells sense and respond to changes in oxygen, and thus has implications for diseases beyond cancer, such as anemia, myocardial infarction, and stroke. His group also showed that leukemic transformation by mutant IDH was reversible, setting the stage for the development and approval of mutant IDH inhibitors, and discovered how thalidomide-like drugs kill myeloma cells by degrading two otherwise undruggable transcription factors. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Katalin Karikó | | | Institution: | University of Szeged, University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Katalin Karikó is professor at University of Szeged and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for 24 years. She is former senior vice president at BioNTech SE, Mainz, Germany, where she worked between 2013-2022. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Szeged, Hungary, in 1982. For four decades, her research has been focusing on RNA-mediated mechanisms with the ultimate goal of developing in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered that nucleoside modifications suppress immunogenicity of RNA, which widened the therapeutic potentials of mRNA. She is co-inventor on mRNA-related patents for application of non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA. Nineteen of those are granted by the US. She co-founded and from 2006-2013 served as CEO of RNARx, a company dedicated to develop nucleoside-modified mRNA for therapy. Her patents, co-invented with Drew Weissman on nucleoside-modified uridines in mRNA is used to create the FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna to fight the pandemic. For their achievement they received many prestigious awards, including the Japan Prize, the Horwitz Prize, the Franklin Award, the Princess Asturias Award, the BBVA award, the Breakthrough Prize, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Jonathan B. Losos | | | Institution: | Washington University in St. Louis | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | | | |
Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary biologist known for his research on how lizards rapidly evolve to adapt to changing environments. He graduated from Harvard University and received his PhD from the University of California. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California Davis, Jonathan moved to Washington University for his first faculty position, before leaving to become a professor of biology at Harvard and Curator in Herpetology at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He then returned to Washington University in 2018 to become the founding Director of the Living Earth Collaborative, a partnership between Washington University, the Saint Louis Zoo and the Missouri Botanical Garden. This new biodiversity center, nearly unique in partnering a leading university, zoo, and garden, has as its mission to advance knowledge and conservation of biodiversity. Losos has written more than 250 scientific papers and three books, most recently The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa (Penguin Random House, 2017), and is an author of a leading college biology textbook (Raven et al., Biology). Losos has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is the recipient of the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award from the American Society of Naturalists, and the David Starr Jordan Prize. | |
| 5 | 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 | | | | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Dolph Schluter | | | Institution: | University of British Columbia | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Dolph Schluter received his BSc in ecology in 1977 from the University of Guelph, Ontario, and his PhD in 1983 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under the supervision of Peter R. Grant (elected to APS 1991). For his PhD thesis, Schluter studied ecological mechanisms driving assembly and evolution of island assemblages of Darwin's finch species. He and an assistant spent nearly two years living in a tent on remote and otherwise uninhabited Galápagos islands collecting field data. Schluter’s work on the finches culminated in the first estimates from nature of “adaptive landscapes” (mean fitness functions), which successfully predicted mean beak sizes of Galápagos ground finches on islands. He was able to compare these landscapes to fitness functions from survival data on natural selection, using a method he also pioneered, and to test evolutionary shifts caused by interspecific competition between species. This work was a key component of the long-term study of the Darwin's finches that is regarded as the most successful ever field study of evolution. Schluter obtained a tenure track position at UBC in 1989, where he played a steering role in building one of the world’s strongest research groups in biodiversity science.
Between 1983 and 1990 Schluter studied the evolution of continental bird assemblages, during which he developed methods to estimate convergence between faunas. This work led to a collaboration with R. E. Ricklefs that produced a highly influential coedited volume on global patterns of species diversity (Chicago, 1993). Schluter’s group continued to work on the evolution of the latitudinal gradient in species diversity. They showed, surprisingly, that speciation rates are often as higher or higher in the temperate zone, where few species are present, than in the much more species-rich tropics. This finding has since been confirmed by numerous other researchers.
In the late 1980’s, Schluter initiated work on threespine stickleback fish in BC, which enabled his landmark experimental and comparative studies on mechanisms driving the origin and divergence of new species. This work yielded advances on many significant research problems in adaptive radiation, and his stickleback species pairs have become one of the best-known natural study systems in evolutionary biology. The work inspired many ideas, culminating in his now classic text, "The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation" (Oxford, 2000). His subsequent collaboration with D. Kingsley and C. Peichel led to the discovery of key genes underlying species differences and made the stickleback a “supermodel” for studies of adaptive genetic variation. He continues to work on the ecology and genetics of adaptation and speciation in stickleback.
Research Interests
I investigate recent adaptive radiation, whereby a single ancestor diversifies rapidly into an array of species that inhabit a variety of environments and that differ in traits used to exploit those environments. I am especially interested in the selection pressures that drive the origin of new species, the ecological interactions that lead to the evolution of species differences, the genetic basis of these differences, and the wider impacts of diversification on ecosystems. I addressed these questions initially in field studies of Darwin’s finches, but over recent decades I have developed for study a natural system having many advantages for experimental study, the threespine sticklebacks of fresh water and coastal marine areas of British Columbia. My work has included the quantitative estimation of natural selection surfaces and ancestral traits, the experimental study of species interactions, natural selection and evolution, and the discovery of genes underlying phenotypic differences between populations and species and their fitness consequences. My second interest is the role of evolutionary processes and historical events in the development and maintenance of Earth's major biodiversity gradients. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Christine Edry Seidman | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Drew Weissman | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | |
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