Professor Stephen Briggs Named to AAAS

October 29, 2007

By Dolores Davies

Four faculty members from the University of California, San Diego have been awarded the distinction of "fellow" by the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science.

"We are now very proud to have more than 70 faculty members who have been named AAAS fellows, which is an impressive achievement for UC San Diego," said Marye Anne Fox, chancellor for UC San Diego. "I want to congratulate these outstanding faculty members for the significant contributions they've made to science."

The AAAS fellows for 2007 include biologist Steven P. Briggs, science historian Naomi Oreskes, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Dean Palmer Taylor, and medical researcher Jason X.-J. Yuan.

Steven P. Briggs, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences, was recognized for "the development and application of biotechnologies leading to discoveries in plant-microbe interactions and functional genomics." Briggs is a molecular biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences who has been working on ways to improve the ability of microbes to produce synthetic alternatives to fossil fuels that can be used as new biofuels. He spent the first half of his career in industry, most recently as senior vice president for Corporate Research at Diversa. Previously, he was president of Torrey Mesa Research Institute and before that, director at Pioneer/DuPont for several research areas including genomics.