Four faculty members at UCSF have been elected as fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers.
Drawn from the sciences, the arts and humanities, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector, the 191 new fellows and 22 foreign honorary members are leaders in their fields and include Nobel laureates and recipients of Pulitzer and Pritzker prizes, Academy and Grammy awards, and Kennedy Center Honors.
Among those elected from UCSF are:
- • Fred E. Cohen, PhD, professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology, pharmaceutical chemistry, medicine, and biochemistry
- • Allison Jane Doupe, MD, PhD, professor of psychiatry and physiology
- • Stephen G. Lisberger, PhD, professor of physiology and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- • Louis J. Ptáček, MD, professor of neurology, director of the division of neurogenetics at the UCSF School of Medicine and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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Fred Cohen |
Cohen has used the computer as an experimental tool to explore the relationships between protein sequence and structure and has used these relationships as a starting point for drug design efforts. The hallmark of these efforts has been the close connection between computation and experiment. More recently, Cohen and Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner, MD, have collaborated to investigate the molecular basis of prion replication. This work has led to the understanding of prion diseases as diseases of protein folding. In the last few years, this insight has catalyzed their work on the development of novel diagnostic tests and therapeutic interventions for prion disease.
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Allison Doupe |
Doupe's laboratory studies birdsong to determine how the nervous system mediates behavior, especially complex behaviors that must be learned. Birdsong provides a very useful model for these issues, with particular relevance to human speech learning. Using a variety of neurophysiological, behavioral and pharmacological techniques, Doupe and colleagues have focused on the development and function of circuits critical for song learning, especially the basal ganglia, which are important both in normal motor learning and numerous neuropsychiatric diseases.
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Stephen Lisberger |
Lisberger, who is director of the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative
Neuroscience, studies the brain mechanisms that create accurate eye movements. Lisberger and colleagues have discovered the brain sites and neural mechanisms that allow the brain to learn and maintain motor skills and behavior. They also have revealed many of the brain mechanisms that convert visual inputs about moving objects into accurate eye movements to visually track the objects. Their recent efforts have discovered that some of the "noise" in brain signals plays an important role in generating variation in behavior.
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Louis Ptáček |
Ptáček's laboratory focuses on genetic diseases of muscle, heart and brain and on hereditary variation of human sleep behavior. His group has cloned genes contributing to many disease and behavioral phenotypes in humans. In addition, he and his collaborators probe the biology underlying normal function of the encoded proteins in the nervous system and pathophysiology of the mutant proteins in human neurological diseases. Study of these single-gene disorders is offering clues to susceptibility genes that may contribute to risk of more common and genetically complex phenotypes like epilepsy, migraine and normal sleep variation.
The 213 scholars, scientists, artists, and civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders in this year's academy class come from 20 states and 15 countries, and range in age from 37 to 86. Represented among this year's newly elected members are more than 50 universities and more than a dozen corporations, as well as museums, national laboratories and private research institutes, media outlets, and foundations.
"The academy honors excellence by electing to membership remarkable men and women who have made preeminent contributions to their fields and to the world," said Academy President Emilio Bizzi, MD, PhD. "We are pleased to welcome into the Academy these new members to help advance our founders' goal of 'cherishing knowledge and shaping the future.'"
The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 11 at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Related Links:
The Cohen Group
What gets a female's attention -- at least a songbird'sNews Release, March 17, 2008
Stephen Lisberger, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Louis J. Ptáček, MD
