Claude dePamphilis Awarded Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement

Claude dePamphilis, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the 2013 Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Life and Health Sciences. Established in 1980, the award recognizes scholarly or creative excellence represented by a single contribution or a series of contributions around a coherent theme. A committee of faculty peers reviews nominations and selects candidates.

A plant biologist with broad interests in processes and patterns of evolution, dePamphilis has focused much of his work on genome sequencing and the generation and analysis of large-scale DNA-expression datasets using bioinformatic and molecular evolutionary approaches. His main areas of interest include the evolution of early flowering plants and the origin of the flower, the functional genomics of parasitic plants, and genome evolution. In addition, dePamphilis is a founder of the Floral Genome Project -- a multi-institutional, multi-collaborator study funded through the National Science Foundation's Plant Genome Research Program. This project is dedicated to the study of evolutionary diversification of floral regulatory genes and pathways throughout the major lineages of flowering plants.

Throughout his career, dePamphilis has had his projects funded by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation Plant Genome Research program. Moreover, dePamphilis's work with the Floral Genome Project and its successor, the Ancestral Angiosperm Genome Project, has resulted in more than 100 research papers and his work has been cited nearly 6,000 times. In addition, dePamphilis has been invited to deliver symposia and seminar lectures around the world and he has earned two Margaret Y. Menzel Awards in 2002 and 1989. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Plant Biologists, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the Botanical Society of America, the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, the Sigma Xi Honor Society, the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. He has published numerous scientific papers in such journals as Nature, Science, Genome Biology, Molecular Biology and Evolution, the American Journal of Botany, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Before joining the Penn State faculty in 1998, dePamphilis was an assistant professor of biology at Vanderbilt University. He received doctoral and master's degrees in botany from the University of Georgia in 1988 and 1982, respectively. He received a bachelor's degree in biology from Oberlin College in 1977.