Martin Yanofsky named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
APRIL 20, 2009
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Division of Biological Sciences professor Martin Yanofsky is among 3 faculty from the University of California, San Diego named Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on April 20th.
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences honors the country's leaders in scholarship, business, the arts and public affairs. New members will be formally welcomed into the Academy at an Induction Ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October.
Founded in 1780, the Academy annually elects individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large. The 2009 class of scholars, scientists, artists, civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders elected as fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences includes 210 new Fellows and 19 new Foreign Honorary Members from 28 states and 11 countries.
Martin Yanofsky
Yanofsky, chair of the Section of Cell and Developmental Biology, studies the genes that control flower and fruit development in the model plant system of Arabidopsis thaliana. Over the past two decades his lab has isolated many of the major regulatory genes that are required not only for the initiation of flowers but also for the development of the four types of flower organs: sepals, petals, stamens and carpels. In recent years his group has turned their attention to the fruit, where they have again used molecular and genetic approaches to identify and characterize important fruit development genes, leading to a model that explains the genetic interactions that determine the fruit's structure. They are now extending this work an earlier phase of the plant life cycle: the development of the female reproductive tract where pollen fertilizes the ovules that will eventually become the seeds.
Yanofsky, an alumnus of UC San Diego, received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He has also received a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering and a Beckman Young Investigator Award and in 2008 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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