Michael O’Connor, an emeritus professor of genetics, cell biology, and development at University of Minnesota and recipient of the 2026 Edward Novitski Prize, can still be seen at the bench running experiments—something he’s been doing throughout his whole career. “I like the interaction and I’m a bench scientist,” he says. “When you’re out in the lab, you can get a whole discussion going and not only is it more fun, it also helps students and postdocs interact with me in a more familiar manner.”

Heidi Bretscher, a former postdoctoral researcher in O’Connor’s lab, recalls, “I’m quite sure Mike has never missed a day in the fly room. He has an absolutely incredible passion for science. He just lives it and breathes it and loves it.” Since starting her lab as an assistant professor of biological sciences at University of Michigan, Bretscher says she’s “determined to be just like Mike,” spending time in the lab every day.

O’Connor began his postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School in the early days of cloning genes. “[Biologists] were just beginning to understand that many eukaryotic genes were big compared to prokaryotes so there was a need to clone and manipulate large pieces of DNA,” he says. O’Connor, who was studying a set of genes that controlled body segmentation in Drosophila, then developed the first bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) for his studies. BACs soon became widely used in the 1990s.

In 1988, O’Connor started a lab at University of California, Irvine where he began studying the role of TGFꞵ signaling in regulating development, body size, and metabolic function in Drosophila. One key study looked at how the dorsal cells in the Drosophila embryo differentiate into distinct tissues. There, he identified mutants in the TGFꞵ signaling pathway and used biochemical and computational assays to further understand their function in determining cell fate. He teamed up with Hans Othmer’s group at University of Minnesota to develop a mathematical model that would show how a pair of proteins within the TGFꞵ superfamily diffuse and form gradients in the embryo to pattern the dorsal-ventral axis in Drosophila. “His lab has contributed a huge amount to body and size scaling in terms of TGFꞵ signaling,” says Bretscher.

O’Connor’s philosophy in research is to go where the science leads him even if that’s a completely different area of work. This is an outlook he has instilled in his trainees, allowing them to explore different directions. “He’s just so supportive of what anyone in his lab wants to do,” says Bretscher. O’Connor explains, “It’s satisfying to be able to take something that you know nothing about, learn about it, and then be able to do something new in the field.”

In this spirit, he began working on the arthropod molting hormone ecdysone in the early 2000s after a serendipitous finding when he came across a mutant with a “spectacular phenotype” while searching for a TGFꞵ receptor. “What’s special to me about this story is that I didn’t know anything about ecdysone,” O’Connor says. He then devoted the next decades to deciphering the enzymes involved in converting cholesterol to ecdysone and understanding how the neuroendocrine system regulates ecdysone pulse generation.

“I was really impressed by the fact that he could lead two research programs at the highest level in two very different fields,” says Pierre Leopold, group leader of genetics and physiology of growth at Institut Curie. Leopold and O’Connor began collaborating when they realized they were both researching neurons that produce prothoracicotropic hormone (PTTH), a hormone that regulates ecdysone synthesis. This collaboration led to the finding that these neurons control both developmental transitions and the response to light cues so that the larvae can pupate in the dark away from predators. Later, they looked at how null mutations of the Ptth gene affected development in Drosophila. Leopold, who describes his collaboration with O’Connor as “probably the most enjoyable part of my career,” says that O’Connor is “one of the very best scientists in biology.”

Since retiring, O’Connor spends stretches of time at the lab bench and then takes time off to see family or compete in ski racing competitions. “My philosophy has always been work hard, play hard,” he says.

Looking back over 40 years of Drosophila research, O’Connor has noticed how advances in technology such as sequencing and microscopy have changed the way biologists do science. But most of all, he notes the contributions of his entire lab. “It’s all the people that have done that work that are really responsible for the award,” says O’Connor. “None of this would have happened without the people that have been in the lab.” 

Please join us in congratulating Michael O’Connor on receiving the Edward Novitski Prize in recognition of his creativity and intellectual ingenuity in solving problems in genetics research.

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