PEOPLE

ASPB Members Fischer, Hake, and Weigel Elected to National Academy of Sciences Class of 2009

Robert Fischer		Sarah Hake		Detlef Weigel

ASPB members Robert Fischer, Sarah Hake, and Detlef Weigel have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Their elections were announced on April 28, 2009, at the Academy’s 146th annual meeting. Each nominee was elected individually for distinguished work and original research in plant biology.

Robert Fischer

Robert (Bob) Fischer was educated in the University of California system: San Diego for his BS in biology, Berkeley for his PhD in molecular biology, and Los Angeles for his postdoctoral work in plant biology. The Golden State continued to suit Bob well as he became an assistant then an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Plant Biology. In 1995, he became a professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at Berkeley, a position he currently maintains.

Bob’s professional activities include coediting The Plant Cell and serving on the editorial boards of Plant and Cell Physiology and Epigenetics and Chromatin. He also has held advisory roles for the National Science Foundation Developmental Biology Program and the International Society for Plant Molecular Biology. Bob joined ASPB in 1987 and later served on its Publications Committee (2001–2007).

Since his postdoctoral Chaim Weizman and National Institutes of Health (NIH) fellowships, Bob has been recognized with many additional honors. For example, he is also a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science fellow and a Sir Frederick McMaster fellow. Most recently preceding his election to NAS, he became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.

A prolific research and publication record forms the cornerstone of Bob’s career. Currently he is studying the basic biology of DNA methylation and demethylation in Arabidopsis, as well as the links between DNA glycosylases and cancer. These projects are just the most recent of the many dozens of studies that he has had published in peer-reviewed journals, some of which have generated additional academic commentary also deemed worthy of publication in selective journals. Despite the wealth of expert knowledge Bob has generated in his field, he did not anticipate this honor from NAS. He reports: “To be honest, I was quite surprised when I discovered that I had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Receiving a telephone call at 5:45 a.m. on April 28, hearing all the excited voices and congratulatory remarks, I felt like I had just passed my qualifying exam, become a tenured professor, and celebrated my birthday all at the same time!

“My being elected reflects, to a great extent, the outstanding colleagues with whom I have had the privilege of working. First and foremost, I thank Robert Goldberg, my mentor when I was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. He taught me the value of persisting, of tackling a big question and addressing it with all the technologies and resources one can bring to it. Together with John Harada and Gary Drews, we set out to understand the regulation of seed development. Although we still have much to learn, I have greatly appreciated our sustained endeavor over many years, the sharing of data, new approaches, and ideas. During this time, a wonderful collaboration was created between our universities and Ceres, Inc., whose support allowed us to explore many aspects of plant reproduction with greater freedom than ever before.

“In addition, I am very grateful to my graduate adviser, Harrison Echols, and my lab mates in the bacteriophage lambda lab, who taught me the fundamentals of genetics and how to design experiments. I very much appreciate my current collaborations with Steve Henikoff and Daniel Zilberman on the study of DNA methylation. Finally, this award goes to the wonderful undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research assistants who have worked in my lab and contributed so much. Although there are simply too many people to name them all, I especially thank Leonore Reiser, Ramin Yadegari, Nir Ohad, Tetsu Kinoshita, Yuki Mizukami, Yeonhee Choi, Mary Gehring, Jin Hoe Huh, Wenyan Xiao, Tzung-Fu Hsieh, and Jon Penterman.”

Sarah Hake

Sarah Hake grew up in Iowa, moving to California with her family at the age of 10, then back to Iowa to attend Grinnell College (BA, biology, 1975). An inspiring botany professor, Vern Durkee, took her on a field trip to the botanical gardens in St. Louis that led to her decision to enter the plant biology program at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. (Wash U). Although she was focused on going to Wash U to do botanical field work, it was the evolution of maize that interested her, and she carried out her PhD with Virginia Walbot, receiving her graduate degree in plant biology in 1980. When Virginia left Wash U to take a position at Stanford, Sarah executed a similar move—but to Berkeley and work in the lab of Mike Freeling. There she was the first to clone a developmental gene using transposons, and she has worked in the area of developmental biology ever since. After a six-year postdoc and two children, she took a position at the USDA–ARS Plant Gene Expression Center in the nearby town of Albany. In 1998, Sarah became full adjunct professor of the UC Berkeley Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, a position she still holds. That same year, Sarah was named director of the Plant Gene Expression Center, which operates under a cooperative agreement between USDA–ARS and UC Berkeley. Sarah’s research continues to focus on maize and development. With the recent sequencing of many plant genomes, including maize, the years of genetics are now being rewarded with rapid gene discovery that will allow improvements not only in maize but other cereal crops.

Sarah’s research efforts have been well recognized. Since 1978, she has garnered nine notable research grants from NSF, NIH, DOE, and USDA for her work in genomics. Several of these grants have been renewed multiple times, underscoring—along with her several dozen research publications—the ongoing importance of her studies. Sarah joined ASPB in 1995. Among other professional awards, she received the 2008 ASPB Stephen Hales Prize. The citation for that award made note of her contributions to our fundamental understanding of plant developmental biology that span the scientific disciplines of evolution, genetics, cell biology, and plant molecular biology.

Sarah has made professional activities an important priority. From 1991 to the present she has helped manage NSF, USDA, and DOE panels. She also has worked as editor, chair, steering committee member, and secretary of various biological science organizations within her areas of expertise. ASPB benefited particularly from her membership since 1995 and her tenure on the Publications Committee (2003–2007) and as a member of the editorial board of The Plant Cell (1996–2003).

Sarah offers these insights about her career: “I have always felt lucky. What a great life to be a scientist and teacher, surrounded by energetic youth, puzzling over data, working with plants and using my hands. Don Kaplan would often tell me that it is the process, how and whom you mentor, that is important, not the product. I must have taken that to heart, as the careers of my students and postdocs have been most important to me and because of their success, I have also succeeded. So, this awesome recognition goes to the many undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs who became enamored with developmental genetics when in my lab. Many names could be mentioned, but certainly George Chuck, Erik Vollbrecht, and Dave Jackson deserve recognition. I also want to recognize Ginny Walbot, who guided me as a graduate student in her lab, and Michael Freeling, for giving me the knotted project and inspiring in me a love of developmental biology. The Plant Gene Expression Center (PGEC) has been a wonderful incubator for research, and thanks go to my colleagues at the PGEC and the support of ARS.”

Thirteen graduate students and 23 postdoctoral fellows since 1987 have received training and research guidance from Sarah. She has been an active educator since 1975, most recently as at UC Berkeley as the developer of and instructor for the undergraduate course “Plant Genetics and Molecular Biology.”

Sarah summarizes her reaction to the NAS election by saying: “Even though I knew Peter Quail was heading to D.C. for the annual NAS meeting, it never occurred to me that I would be part of that meeting. The garbled messages on the machine sounded like someone’s cell phone misbehaving. Listening to the messages a couple of times, I wondered whether I was imagining they were congratulating me, so checking the e-mails assured me that this was not just a dream.”

Detlef Weigel

Detlef Weigel currently is the executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, a position he has held since 2007. For six years prior to that, he was the director of the institute’s Department of Molecular Biology. Weigel also has been an associate adjunct and adjunct professor at the Department of Biology, UC San Diego in La Jolla, and the Plant Biology Laboratory at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, also in La Jolla.

Trained as a Drosophila developmental biologist with an MS in biology from the University of Cologne, Germany, Weigel earned his PhD in genetics in 1988 at the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology and Eberhard Karls University. He switched to the study of plants during his postdoctoral career as a research associate (Institute of Genetics, University of Munich) and a research fellow (Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology–Pasadena). As an independent investigator, analyses of floral patterning led him to become interested in how the onset of flowering is controlled. Because flowering is a quintessential adaptive trait in the wild, Weigel, with his Salk colleague Joanne Chory, started in the late 1990s to investigate natural genetic variation in Arabidopsis thaliana. While initially geared toward problems of flowering and responses to light, this research has expanded to include a project on hybrid fitness and reproductive isolation, as well as to close relatives of A. thaliana. Although Detlef’s work on genetic variation has a major focus on generating whole-genome resources, his laboratory continues to be active in hypothesis-driven analyses of plant development. To date, these ongoing studies have resulted in 44 published papers and one book, Arabidopsis—A Laboratory Manual (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001), which Detlef coauthored with Jane Glazebrook.

Detlef’s work has been recognized consistently throughout his career. Prior to his election to NAS, he has been elected to various prestigious international academies. He also has received awards and six different fellowships since his days as an undergraduate. Of particular note to the ASPB membership is Detlef’s receipt of the Charles Albert Shull Award in 2001 in recognition of his seminal contributions to one of the most challenging problems in developmental biology: the induction of floral development.

Professional activities have also been an integral part of Detlef’s career. He has served on numerous biotechnology advisory boards and grant advisory panels in the United States and Europe. He has applied his expertise to organizing and directing various professional meetings, networks, and steering committees within his field. At least a dozen different editorial boards, including that of The Plant Cell, have benefited from Detlef’s insights on genes, cells, plant development, and the field of plant biology.

Weigel had this to say about learning of his election to the NAS: “My assistant came running down the hall, and told me that a Professor Meyerowitz was on the phone with an urgent message. What followed was one of the most memorable moments in my scientific career. First my postdoctoral mentor, Elliot, congratulated me on being elected to the NAS, followed by many other plant colleagues whose work I greatly admire. As a naturalized citizen living abroad, this is a very special honor indeed. It is both a reflection of the wonderful coworkers who I have been lucky enough to have had in my lab during the past 16 years, and of the fantastic work environments at the Salk, where I got my start as an independent investigator, and at the Max Planck Institute. And I am very proud to be in the company of so many colleagues and friends who have fundamentally influenced my research, from Elliot and Joanne to Marty Yanofsky, Caroline Dean, Maarten Koornneef, Steve Kay, Joe Ecker, and Jim Carrington, to name but a few.”

Bob, Sarah, and Detlef were among the 72 members and 18 foreign associates from 15 countries elected this year. Election to NAS is one of the highest honors a scientist or engineer can receive. Potential NAS members can be nominated only by an existing NAS member. Membership is achieved only through a formal and confidential election process.