Today, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced Vicki Chandler’s election to the Genetics Society of America’s Board of Directors.
Dr. Chandler will serve as vice president in 2013 and as GSA president in 2014, and joins five other new Board members, elected by the general membership. She 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.
“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,” Chandler explained.
At the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Dr. Chandler leads the Science Program’s investments in the development of new technologies, supporting top research scientists and bringing together new, often groundbreaking, scientific partnerships. The program’s portfolio—designed to advance scientific innovation and discovery—includes the Marine Microbiology Initiative, a plant science collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a new Data-Driven Discovery Initiative and commitments to the California Institute of Technology and Thirty Meter Telescope.
Dr. Chandler’s 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. 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) Director’s Pioneer Award. Dr. Chandler served as president of the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2002.
“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.”
Other newly elected members of GSA’s Board of Directors are:
• 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.
These new officers and directors began their tenure on January 1, 2013, and will remain on the GSA Board until December 31, 2015.
About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation, patient care and scientific research. Believing in the inherent value of science and the sense of awe that discovery inspires, the Foundation’s Science Program invests in the development of new technologies, supports the world’s top scientists, and brings together partnerships with the aim to transform, push the boundaries of—and even create—entire fields of scientific research. For more information, please visit www.moore.org. Follow @moorescientific.
About the Genetics Society of America
Founded in 1931, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) is the professional scientific society for genetics researchers and educators. Its nearly 5,000 members work to advance knowledge in the basic mechanisms of inheritance, from the molecular to the population level. GSA promotes research and fosters communication among geneticists worldwide through a number of GSA-sponsored conferences including the biennial conference on Model Organisms to Human Biology, an interdisciplinary meeting on current and cutting edge topics in genetics research, and annual and biennial meetings that focus on the genetics of particular model organisms. GSA publishes GENETICS, the leading journal for seminal research in the field and a new, online publication, G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, which publishes high quality foundational research, particularly research that generates useful genetic and genomic information. For more information about GSA, please visit www.genetics-gsa.org. Also follow GSA on Facebook at facebook.com/GeneticsGSA and on Twitter @GeneticsGSA.
Related Link:
http://www.genetics-gsa.org/pdf/New%20GSA%20Board%20Members%202013%20FINAL.pdf