Community Voices

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Michael Wangler Assistant Professor (starting July 2016) Department of Molecular and Human Genetics Baylor College of Medicine Lab website Research program: The overall long-term goal…

My apologies for this blog post to Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, who collaborated with Sir Arthur Sullivan on a series of comic operas that included The Pirates of Penzance. Pirates premiered in 1879 and featured a song called “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” and I am far from the first to…

“This is the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer. Because it’s very difficult to eliminate multiple genes from a cell . . . we decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route—even though nobody had been there before—to see if we could synthesize the…

Model Organism Databases (MODs) and the Gene Ontology Consortium play a crucial “behind-the-scenes” role in the work of model organism geneticists and many other biomedical researchers. This guest post by the newly-formed Alliance of Genome Resources announces the group’s intention to integrate the efforts of the MODs and other genome resources. You can learn more…

Phil Hieter, former GSA President and a Co-Chair for The Allied Genetics Conference, works at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, where Dave Ng directs the Michael Smith Laboratories Teaching Facility, AMBL. Dave developed a popular card game, Phylo, as a method to teach people about biodiversity, and Phil had an idea—what…

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Divya Sitaraman Assistant Professor (since 2014) Department of Psychological Sciences University of San Diego Lab website Research program: My long-term goal is to understand behavioral outputs…

Dr. Cori Bargmann studies how an animal’s genes, environment and experience cooperate to influence different behaviors. Bargmann, Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and the head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, served as co-chair of the NIH Advisory Committee for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative…

In my thirty plus years as a faculty member I’ve had a lot of people in tears sitting in my office. Too many to tally, really. They were women and men, grad students and postdocs, from the U.S. and abroad, from my lab and other labs. How do we – charged with responsibility for the…

By guest authors Robert K. Herman, Gabriela Huelgas-Morales, and David Greenstein This summer, GSA is throwing a genetics shindig–The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC)–to bring geneticists from multiple disciplines together to promote interaction and cross-fertilization among fields. In a way, this meeting extends a current trend: GENETICS authors have been aggregating for some time. Those of us…

New Faculty Profiles showcase GSA members who are establishing their first independent labs. If you’d like to be considered for a profile, please complete this form on the GSA website. Phillip Jordan Assistant Professor (since 2013) Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department Bloomberg School of Public Health Lab website Research program: Assessment of the functions of…

  The first plenary talk at the fast approaching Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC) will be given by Leonard Zon.  His talk is certain to provide an exciting start to the joint meeting sessions. Zon is the Grousbeck Professor of Pediatric Medicine at Harvard, Director of the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and an…