Penn State Intercom......April 4 , 2002
Fedoroff, Walker earn
Evan Pugh professorships
By Vicki Fong
Public
Information
Nina Fedoroff, the
Willaman professor of life sciences and director of the Life Sciences
Consortium and the Biotechnology Institute, and Alan Walker, distinguished
professor of anthropology and biology, have been named Evan Pugh professors,
the highest distinction that Penn State can bestow upon a faculty member.
Named after Penn State's first president, this prestigious title is awarded to faculty members whose research publications and creative work are of the highest quality over a period of time; are acknowledged national and international leaders in their fields as documented by pioneering research or creative accomplishments; are recipients of prestigious awards; and demonstrate excellent teaching skills with undergraduate and graduate students.
Fedoroff currently
explores the genes that contribute to a plant's ability to fight off disease
and such environmental pollutants as ozone. Plants have a complex reaction
to biological stresses, such as disease organisms, and non-biological
stresses, such as ozone. They produce many protective compounds and generally
reinforce the whole plant's ability to withstand further attack. The approach
to understanding this complex response is to identify the genes that are
turned on and study their activation using the new method of DNA microchip
expression profiling. Fedoroff hopes to identify which genes control other
genes and how they control them. This will allow geneticists to strengthen
the ability of plants to withstand such environmental assaults.
A native of Cleveland, she received a bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry in 1966 from Syracuse University and her doctoral degree in molecular biology from Rockefeller University in 1972. She joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she continued her research on nuclear RNA.
Later, she was a Damon Runyan-Walter Winchell and NIH post-doctoral fellow, at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore. Working in the laboratory of Donald Brown, Fedoroff pioneered in DNA sequencing. In 1978, Fedoroff became a staff member at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a faculty member in the Biology Department at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focus changed to the isolation and molecular characterization of maize transposable elements. The isolation of the maize transposons, discovered genetically by 1983 Nobel Laureate in Medicine Barbara McClintock in the 1940s, was achieved in the early 1980s. In subsequent years, Fedoroff's lab showed that the maize transposons were active in a variety of other plants, developed transposon tagging systems, and studied the epigenetic regulation of transposon activity.
In 1995 Fedoroff joined the Penn State faculty in her current positions. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Science Board. She also chairs the Publication Committee of the Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
She is a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Englehardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow. She also is a member of the board of directors of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and the Sigma-Aldrich Chemical Co.
Fedoroff has received awards and honors, including an NIH Merit Award, a 10-year research grant that supported her work from 1989 to 1999. She also received the University of Chicago's Howard Taylor Ricketts Award in 1990, the New York Academy of Sciences' Outstanding Contemporary Woman Scientist award in 1992 and the Sigma Xi McGovern Science and Society Medal in 1997.
Walker is one
of the world's foremost experts on the evolution of primates and humans.
His research involves searching for primate and human fossils in rocks
dated from about 30 million to
1 million years ago. He pioneered the study of living primates as a basis
for the analysis of fossils and was one of the first to use scanning electron
microscope studies of enamel microwear on teeth to understand the diets
of extinct mammals.
He has made many important discoveries during the past three decades at paleontological digs in Africa with his collaborators Richard and Meave Leakey, including a famous hominid specimen known as "The Black Skull." In 1995, he and Meave Leakey discovered the skeletal remains of a previously unknown species in the human lineage, which they named Australopithecus anamensis, that lived about 4 million years ago. One of the surprising revelations resulting from his subsequent analysis of these remains is that these ancestors of humans were walking upright that long ago.
His most prominent books include The Nariokotome Homo erectus Skeleton; Structure and Function of the Human Skeleton; and The Wisdom of the Bones.
Walker was honored with a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1986 and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life in 1992. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1988, elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999. Other awards include the Fyssen Foundation 1998 International Prize and the Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.
A native of England, he earned a bachelor's degree with honors in geology and zoology at Cambridge University, United Kingdom, in 1962 and a doctoral degree in anatomy and paleontology at London University in 1967. He taught anatomy at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London; the Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda; and the University of Nairobi, Kenya, before moving to the United States in 1973. From 1974 to 1978, he was a faculty member in the Department of Anatomy at Harvard Medical School, where he also was associated with Harvard University's biology and anthropology departments. He was a professor of cell biology and anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1978 until he joined the Penn State faculty in 1995.
Vicki Fong can be reached at vfong@psu.edu.