Genetics Society of America Welcomes 2013 Board Members

Newswise The Genetics Society of America (GSA) welcomes six new members elected by the general membership to the 2013 GSA Board of Directors. The new members include a vice president, secretary and four directors. They are: Vicki L. Chandler, PhD (Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation). Dr. Chandler will serve as vice president in 2013 and as GSA president in 2014. Anne M. Villeneuve, PhD (Stanford University School of Medicine). Dr. Villeneuve will serve as secretary beginning 2013. Lynn Cooley, PhD (Yale University), director. Anna Di Rienzo, PhD (University of Chicago), director. Sarah C. R. Elgin, PhD (Washington University in St. Louis), director. Deborah A. Siegele, PhD (Texas A&M University), director.

As always, GSA is fortunate to be able to call upon such talented individuals to provide leadership for the Society, said GSA Executive Director Adam P. Fagen, PhD. As we welcome these new leaders, we thank the outgoing Board members for their years of dedicated service to GSA,

These new officers and directors began their tenure on January 1, 2013, and will remain on the GSA Board until December 31, 2015.

New Members of the GSA Board of Directors

Vice President (and President-Elect): Vicki L. Chandler, PhD, Chief Program OfficerScience, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Palo Alto, CA.

Dr. Chandler is a plant geneticist and a long-time GSA member, who has served as an editor of the GSA journal GENETICS and as a member of the GSA Board in the 1990s. Her research on paramutation, an epigenetic process, has implications not only for maize, which she used in her research, but also for animal and human genetics and genetic diseases. For most of the last decade, Dr. Chandler has built bridges between the genetic worlds of plants and animals and developed a number of lasting scientific partnerships. From 2004-2009, she was director of the BIO5 Institute, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Arizona, while her own lab worked on maize and other plants as models of genetic effects and applied findings to the study of human biology. At the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Dr. Chandler helps foster scientific partnerships and the development of new technologies. In her new role as Vice President of GSA, she says, GSA has an obligation to communicate through public outreach and education, advances in genetics that offer significant potential improvements in health, energy, food and the environment, but also raise personal and social issues. Dr. Chandler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; she is also a Searle Scholar and Presidential Young Investigator and received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Directors Pioneer Award. Dr. Chandler served as president of the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2002.

Secretary: Anne M. Villeneuve, PhD, Professor of Developmental Biology and Genetics, Department of Developmental Biology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA.

A developmental geneticist, Dr. Villeneuve studies the mechanisms of chromosome inheritance in eukaryotes during meiosis, using the nematode worm C. elegans for much of her work. She has been a member of GSA for many years and has participated in many GSA-sponsored conferences, has served as an associate editor of GENETICS, and has published some of her most influential articles in the Journal. She has an abiding, vested interest in promoting and sustaining the crucial mission of GSA, which includes being an advocate for support of basic science research and continued government support for crucial resources such as the genetics stock centers and databases that are essential to sustain ongoing research. She received a Junior Faculty Scholar Award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and was named a Searle Scholar.

Directors: Lynn Cooley, PhD, C.N.H. Long Professor of Genetics; Professor of Cell Biology and Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Dr. Cooley studies egg development or oogenesis, using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model system. Specifically, her lab focuses on the cellular mechanisms controlling egg growth, which, according to her laboratory website, are directly relevant to female fertility in other animals, including humans. She is an associate editor of the GSA journal GENETICS, and has been a member of GSA for many years. She is also an active member of the Drosophila genetics community, including serving as an organizer for the GSA-sponsored Annual Drosophila Research Conference in 2009. As a member of the GSA Board of Directors, Dr. Cooley is looking forward to supporting GSAs incredibly important advocacy effort to maintain government support for basic research in these times of tight federal budgets. She received a Damon RunyonWalter Winchell Cancer Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship and was named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences.

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Genetics Society of America Welcomes 2013 Board Members