Cosgrove Named Fellow of American Society of Plant Biologists
Daniel Cosgrove, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Biology, has been named an inaugural fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB). The award was presented at the society's annual meeting in July 2007 in Chicago, Illinois. Established in 2007, the honor is given in recognition of distinguished and long-term contributions to plant biology and for service to ASPB by current members in areas that include research, education, mentoring, outreach, and professional and public service.
Cosgrove's research concerns the mechanisms of plant-cell growth. In the early 1980s he pioneered the use of the pressure microprobe to evaluate hydraulic constraints on cell enlargement. This work led to theoretical and experimental analyses of cell-wall stress relaxation as the key biophysical process controlling cell enlargement. In 1992, while searching for proteins with wall-loosening functions, his group was the first to isolate proteins that allow the cell walls of plants to grow while maintaining their rigidity. Cosgrove named these cells "expansins," and the discovery spawned a new area of biological research. Cosgrove and his colleagues subsequently determined that plants have many expansin genes with diverse roles.
Recent work in Cosgrove's lab is focused on the developmental, structural, and evolutionary aspects of the expansin-gene superfamily. By isolating and characterizing the genes that control expression of expansins in the cell, his lab is helping to explain how plants control their growth under a variety of conditions and how they adapt to environmental stresses.
Cosgrove's research accomplishments have received numerous awards and honors, including his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1993. He also received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award and the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Life Sciences in 1996, the Charles A. Shull Award for Outstanding Investigations in Plant Physiology in 1991, the Fulbright Senior Professor Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989, and the McKnight Foundation Award in 1986.
Cosgrove served as president of ASPB from 2000 to 2001 and as chairman of the board of the ASPB Educational Foundation in 2002 and 2003. He was a councillor of the American Society for Photobiology from 1986 to 1988 and served on the governing board of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology from 1993 to 1995.
He has been a reviewer for Science, Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Plant Molecular Biology, Plant Physiology, Plant Cell, the Canadian Journal of Botany, Plant Science Letters, the Journal of Theoretical Biology, the Journal of Experimental Botany, the American Journal of Botany, and the International Journal of Plant Sciences, as well as several other professional journals.
Cosgrove joined the Penn State faculty as an assistant professor of biology in 1983. He was promoted to associate professor in 1987 and to professor in 1991, and was named Distinguished Professor in 2000. In 2001, he was named Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Biology. He has been a visiting professor in Germany at the University of Göttingen and at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology. He earned his doctoral degree in biological sciences at Stanford University in 1980 and his bachelor's degree in botany at the University of Massachusetts in 1974.
CONTACTS:
Daniel Cosgrove: (+1) 814-863-3892, fsl@psu.edu
Barbara Kennedy (PIO): (+1) 814-863-4682, science@psu.edu