News

GSA member Jason Sheltzer joins Zhao Zhang as one of 16 recipients of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award for 2015. Established in 2011, the Early Independence Awards program provides an opportunity for exceptional junior scientists who have recently received their doctoral degree or finished medical residency to skip traditional post-doctoral training and move immediately into independent research positions. In…

GSA member Giovanni Bosco was named as one of 13 recipients of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for 2015. Established in 2004, the Pioneer Awards challenges investigators at all career levels to pursue new research directions and develop groundbreaking approaches with a high impact on a broad area of biomedical or behavioral science.   Giovanni Bosco, PhD…

GSA member Zhao Zhang was named as one of 16 recipients of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award for 2015, joining Jason Sheltzer. Established in 2011, the Early Independence Awards program provides an opportunity for exceptional junior scientists who have recently received their doctoral degree or finished medical residency to skip traditional post-doctoral training and move immediately into independent research…

This week, GENETICS and protocols.io are launching a partnership to improve the materials & methods sections of published papers. The journal GENETICS, published by the Genetics Society of America, is encouraging authors to publish detailed methods on protocols.io, in parallel with their article’s publication in GENETICS. Also, as part of the partnership, several accepted manuscripts…

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three researchers for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair: Tomas Lindahl (Francis Crick Institute, UK) for discovery of base excision repair, which counteracts damage to DNA bases; Paul Modrich (HHMI and Duke University) for demonstrating mismatch repair, which occurs during DNA replication; and Aziz Sancar (University of North Carolina…

The Human Gene-Editing Initiative launched earlier this year by the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Medicine held a public meeting to provide an overview of the state of gene editing science in preparation for an international summit to conducted in partnership with the Royal Society and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.…

The Conversations in Genetics project, led by former GSA President Rochelle Easton Esposito, has a new in-depth interview of Mary-Claire King by Evan Eichler. As described in the video “Talking with Mary-Claire King,” Dr. King is American Cancer Society Professor of Genome Sciences and Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her innovative studies of human genetics…

  Members of the GSA staff and leadership will be participating in the annual meeting of our sister society, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG). If you’ll be attending ASHG 2015 in Baltimore, please look out for us, including at the following events:   Exhibit Hall GSA will be at Booth 2008 in the exhibit…

The use of fetal tissue has drawn increasing public scrutiny in recent weeks as a result of secret video recordings involving the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Getting less attention is how fetal cells can be essential research tools. A story on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning focused on the research and clinical applications of fetal cells,…

GSA is proud to congratulate GENETICS author John Novembre, who was recently named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow or “MacArthur Genius.”  Novembre is a computational biologist whose research focuses on understanding human evolutionary history. His research findings have improved the field’s knowledge of human migratory patterns and demonstrated a correlation between shared ancestral geography and genetic similarity among Europeans. These…

This article was originally written by Rachel Brackens and published in the Harding University student newspaper, The Bison. The text below is provided with permission of the author and original publication.   In a world where English and science have historically been at odds, alumna Sarah Bay found a way to successfully merge her love for…