Articles tagged GSA Awards
(61 results)

Ed Smith knows the power of having footsteps to follow. Six of his older brothers earned PhDs, he says, and observing their experiences helped him set his course. “It was important to me to learn from them,” he says. “If you have a good role model, you’ll be able to follow their paths, and you…

One of life’s great mysteries is how a single egg cell can contain all the information needed to create a fully specialized complex organism, including more egg cells. Ruth Lehmann, director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, has done a tremendous amount to solve that mystery. Beginning in her graduate student days, she uncovered a…

After giving a talk in Seattle about chromosome pairing, Chao-ting (Ting) Wu boarded the redeye flight back to Boston and settled in to read a new research paper on an odd new discovery in the human genome. “It was so exciting, I had to get up and walk around on the plane,” she says. “I…

The Genetics Society of America is pleased to announce the 2021 recipients of its annual awards for distinguished service in the field of genetics. The five scientists honored are recognized by their peers for their outstanding contributions to research and education. Awardees will present their work in a lecture series to be held online during…

Today it’s easy to take for granted that geneticists can identify a mutation, find its gene, and map it to the expressed protein. But just a few decades ago, this problem remained a thorny one. Welcome Bender of Harvard Medical School—with his work teasing out the function of the bithorax complex in Drosophila—made key advances…

Julie Ahringer has focused her career on understanding development and transcriptional regulation in Caenorhabditis elegans. Along the way her lab has built invaluable tools, including a genome-wide RNAi library, that have supported a huge range of discoveries across biology. In recognition of this work, Ahringer has been awarded the 2020 George W. Beadle Award from…

Fifteen years ago, Seth Bordenstein and a small group of colleagues started planning a series of lab experiences that would bring cutting edge genetics methods into biology classrooms. Because they worked on Wolbachia microbes that live in half of the world’s arthropod species, they centered the work on these bacterial parasites and started locally with…

When Bonnie Bassler was wrapping up her biochemistry PhD at Johns Hopkins University, she heard a research talk at a small conference in Baltimore that switched on a light and changed her career. A geneticist described how groups of bioluminescent marine Vibrio bacteria could start glowing simultaneously. “I’m sitting there thinking ‘Holy Smokes, how is…

For more than 50 years, Gerald Fink of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and David Botstein of Calico Life Sciences have made unique, and sometimes intersecting, contributions to genetics. Together they taught an advanced genetics course at MIT for more than a decade; they’ve co-authored a series of perspective papers and patents. Each has mentored dozens…

The Genetics Society of America is pleased to announce the 2020 recipients of its annual awards for distinguished service in the field of genetics. The awardees were nominated and selected by their colleagues and will be recognized with presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, held April 22–26, 2020 in the metro Washington, DC area. The…

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that Anne Villeneuve, PhD, of Stanford University is the recipient of the 2019 Genetics Society of America Medal. Villeneuve is recognized for her research on the mechanisms governing chromosome inheritance during sexual reproduction.  Her research focuses on meiosis, the specialized cell division program involved in…