| | 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? : |
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| | | 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. Laurie H. Glimcher | | | Institution: | Dana Farber Cancer Institute; Harvard Medical School | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | 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. | |
| 3 | Name: | Professor Annette Gordon-Reed | | | Institution: | Harvard Law School; Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | | | |
Annette Gordon-Reed is currently Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and University Professor and Professor of History at Harvard University. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984. She has taught at a number of institutions, including as Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School, Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University, and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
In the vast library of Thomas Jefferson studies, few scholars have done more to challenge received wisdom than Gordon-Reed. Her first book challenged the dominant view that Jefferson could never have engaged in amorous relations with a woman of mixed African-American descent by carefully identifying the inherently racist and psychologically problematic claims that had long rejected this possibility. Gordon-Reed demonstrated that every source of evidence required equally scruplulous examination, and that the oral histories of the Hemings family were just as valuable than what turned out to be the contrived tales of later Jeffersons. The importance of that approach became evident after the 1998 publication of a study indicating that Hemings descendants were genetically linked to the male Jefferson line. Building on that finding, Gordon-Reed’s second book on The Hemingses of Monticello provided a reconstruction of this family’s life that was at once boldly imaginative yet again rigorously grounded in the evidence. The nuanced portrait of Jefferson that has in turn emerged from these two studies, and which is reflected in the book she recently co-authored with Peter Onuf, has made the field of Jefferson studies even more complicated.
Annette Gordon-Reed has won a number of awards, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2008, the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2009, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010, and the National Humanities Medal in 2010. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2011. Her works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1998), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002), The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), Andrew Johnson (2011), with Peter S. Onuf "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016), and On Juneteenth (2021). Annette Gordon-Reed was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Naomi Oreskes | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 404c | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | | | |
Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is an internationally renowned geologist, science historian, and author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science, including The Rejection of Continental Drift, Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, and in recent decades has been a leading voice on the issue of anthropogenic climate change. Her research focuses on the earth and environmental sciences, with a particular interest in understanding scientific consensus and dissent. Her 2004 essay "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" (Science 306: 1686) has been widely cited, both in the United States and abroad, including in the Royal Society’s publication, "A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change," in the Academy-award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.
https://histsci.fas.harvard.edu/people/naomi-oreskes | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Gary Ruvkun | | | Institution: | Harvard Medical School; Massachusetts General Hospital | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 207. Genetics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | 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. | |
| 6 | 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? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Clifford J. Tabin is the George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor and Chair of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. 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. He joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1989.
Tabin pioneered the molecular genetic analysis of embryonic development of vertebrates, and ever since has been a leader in the field that attempts to understand how limbs and digits develop in individuals and evolve in different species. He has made outstanding contributions to the question of how bilateral symmetry in appendages like wings and legs is regulated, and how, in contrast, asymmetry arises in development, as in the placement of the heart in humans and in the coiling of the intestine. In other pioneering work his group have identified genes that regulate the length and depth of the beaks of Darwin’s finches, and genes that are responsible for the loss of pigment and vision in cave fish. He established a preclinical science education program in the medical school in Kathmandu in Nepal in order to train doctors to work with poor people in rural areas.
He received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 1999, the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology in 2008, and the Society for Developmental Biology’s Conklin Medal in 2012. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2000, the National Academy of Sciences since 2007, and the Royal Society of London since 2014. Tabin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Xiaowei Zhuang | | | Institution: | Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1970 | | | | | | |
Xiaowei Zhuang is the David B. Arnold Professor of Science at Harvard University and an investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her laboratory has developed single-molecule, super-resolution and genomic-scale imaging methods, including STORM and MERFISH, and has used these methods to discover novel molecular structures in cells and cell organizations in tissues.
Zhuang received her BS in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, her PhD in physics in the lab of Prof. Y. R. Shen at University of California, Berkeley, and her postdoctoral training in biophysics in the lab of Prof. Steven Chu at Stanford University. She joined the faculty of Harvard University in 2001 and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2005.
Zhuang is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization, a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. She received honorary doctorate degrees from the Stockholm University in Sweden and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She has received a number of awards, including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, National Academy of Sciences Award in Scientific Discovery, Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics, American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, MacArthur Fellowship, etc. | |
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