Newswise University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers Joseph G. Gleeson, MD, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of neurosciences and pediatrics, and Richard D. Kolodner, PhD, professor of medicine and Ludwig Cancer Research scientist, have been named new members of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), considered among the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

Gleeson and Kolodner were among 70 new members and 10 foreign associates announces today at the IOMs annual meeting, bringing total IOM membership to 1,966 worldwide. Forty-six UC San Diego faculty members, current and emeritus, are IOM members.

Joseph Gleeson

Gleeson is principal investigator at the Center for Brain Development, a laboratory that seeks to understand the genetic basis of brain diseases such as mental retardation, epilepsy and autism using genetic tools. He is also director of the UC San Diego Neuroscience Core, co-director of the Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program and a member of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at UC San Diego.

He is also a member of the Child Neurology Society, the Society for Neuroscience and the American Society for Human Genetics, and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Child Neurology, Human Molecular Genetics and Journal of Pediatric Neurology.

Gleeson earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry at UC San Diego and his medical degree at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He came to UC San Diego in 1999. Among his awards and honors are the Klingenstein Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences, a Searle Scholar Award and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research.

Richard Kolodner

Kolodner, professor in cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine and UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, has made seminal contributions to understanding the connection between DNA mismatch repair the ability of cells to fix genetic errors in DNA and cancer.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2000), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2008), the American Society for Microbiology, the Genetics Society of America and American Association for Cancer Research. He has served on numerous advisory and review boards, including the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scientific Review Board.

Among his awards are the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Morse Research Award, the Charles S. Mott Prize of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation and the Landon-AACR Prize for Basic Cancer Research.

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Two UC San Diego Researchers Elected to Institute of Medicine