Jim Posakony Named 2011 AAAS Fellow

December 8, 2011

By Kim McDonald

Professor Jim Posakony is one of nine faculty members at UC San Diego named 2011 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest scientific organization.

Jim Posakony

He and UC San Diego professors Alexandra Newton, Joseph O’Connor, Carol Padden, Dena Plemmons, Michael Sailor, Lu Jeu Sham, Lisa Tauxe and Paul Yu were among 539 individuals selected this year by colleagues in their disciplines to be honored by the association for “efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.”

The new Fellows, who were announced by the association this week, will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue rosette pin (representing science and engineering, respectively) on February 18 at the 2012 AAAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Posakony was honored “for distinguished contributions to the field of developmental biology, particularly in the area of cell-cell signaling and the transcriptional control of cell fate specification.” A cell and developmental biologist, he uses laboratory fruit flies to probe the mechanisms by which cell to cell signaling pathways and transcriptional regulatory networks act to specify cell fates during animal development. He has been a faculty member in the Division of Biological Sciences since 1985.