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GSA member Erin K. O’Shea has been selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) as its sixth president and will assume the top position on September 1, 2016. O’Shea has served as HHMI’S vice president and chief scientific officer since 2013. She is also a professor at Harvard University. With a background in yeast research, O’Shea’s…

Following the much appreciated budget increases for scientific agencies in December, science and health advocates alike were ecstatic at the mention of a “cancer moonshot” in President Obama’s final State of the Union Address to the House of Representatives. It is reported that the White House  plans to request $755 million for cancer research funding as…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) is seeking applications for predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships offered through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) and its Education and Literacy Initiative. The fellowships will support training and students and postdocs relevant to AFRI’s six identified challenge areas: childhood obesity prevention, climate change,…

  GSA undergraduate member Ben Blue was featured in the January 2016 issue of Alaska Airlines’ Alaska Beyond | Horizon Edition Magazine. As part of an article on college students conducting research that may make a difference in the world, the magazine highlighted Ben’s research on how diet affects health. Working in the lab of Patrick Phillips at the…

Susan E. “Sue” Celniker (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) has been awarded the Society’s George W. Beadle Award for her outstanding contributions to the Drosophila community. “Sue is leading several efforts that are producing tools to facilitate studies of the genome, and is applying these tools to a myriad of functional studies. It is difficult to…

Publishing research in one of the GSA Journals as an undergraduate is a significant and valuable authorship experience and we want to hear your story (even if it was published years ago!). GSA’s Spotlight on Undergraduate Research showcases GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics authors who were undergraduates when contributing to their paper. Holly (Martha) Elmore PhD Candidate, Harvard University…

GSA is pleased to announce the recipients of the DeLill Nasser Award for Professional Development in Genetics for Spring 2016. The award is given twice a year to graduate students and postdoctoral trainees to support the costs of attending national and international meetings and enroll in laboratory courses. It also provides young geneticists the opportunity to…

Longtime GSA member Kathryn V. Anderson has been honored by the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) with its Edwin G. Conklin Medal in recognition of “her extraordinary and sustained research contributions to the field of developmental biology and mentoring of the next generation of scientists.”   Kathryn V. Anderson, PhD Chair, Developmental Biology Program, and Member…

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that William “Bill” Wood (University of Colorado Boulder) has been awarded the Society’s Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education in recognition of his significant and sustained impact in genetics education. “Dr. Wood is one of the pioneers in the reform of science teaching. He…

For an American biologist, submitting a grant application to the NIH may feel like buying a lottery ticket for Powerball. Or perhaps it’s more like the inside of the bottlecap that reads, “Each participant has a 1 in 250,000 chance of winning the big prize.” Yet there may be a way to make the likelihood…

In response to concerns that have been raised about reproducibility in biomedical research, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) invited experts, delegates from its member societies (including GSA), and representatives from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and other stakeholders to discuss general factors that may impede the ability to…