Fedoroff Awarded Honorary Degree at Rockefeller University
Nina V. Fedoroff, the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Life Sciences and Evan Pugh Professor of Life Sciences at Penn State, has been awarded an honorary doctorate by The Rockefeller University during commencement ceremonies celebrating its 50th anniversary during June 2008.
One of the nation's most prominent researchers in molecular biology and genetics, Fedoroff recently received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest award for scientific research, at a White House ceremony in 2007. She currently is on leave from Penn State while serving the United States as the Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State and to the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Fedoroff is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology, and she has served on the National Science Board. In her position as Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State, Fedoroff is responsible for enhancing science and technology literacy and capacity at the State Department and for providing advice on current and emerging science and technology issues as they impact foreign policy.
Throughout her career, Fedoroff has distinguished herself in the development and application of molecular and genetic techniques to important biological problems. She earned a bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry, graduating summa cum laude, at Syracuse University in 1966 and a Ph.D. degree in molecular biology at the Rockefeller University in 1972, then she joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she carried out research on nuclear RNA.
In 1974, Fedoroff received fellowships from the Damon Runyan-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fund and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for postdoctoral work, first at UCLA and then in the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (now the Carnegie Institution for Science). Working in the laboratory of Donald Brown , Fedoroff pioneered in DNA sequencing, determining the nucleotide sequence of the first complete gene. In 1978, Fedoroff became a staff member at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a faculty member in the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focus changed to the isolation and molecular characterization of maize transposable elements. The isolation of the maize transposons, discovered genetically by Barbara McClintock in the 1940s, was achieved in the early 1980s. In subsequent years, Fedoroff's lab showed that the maize transposons were active in a variety of other plants, developed transposon tagging systems, and studied the epigenetic regulation of transposon activity.
In 1995, Fedoroff joined the Penn State faculty as Willaman Professor of Life Sciences. From 1995 to 2002, she served as the Director of the Biotechnology Institute and she organized and served as the first Director of the Life Sciences Consortium (now the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences), a seven-college organization devoted to the promotion of multidisciplinary research and teaching in the life sciences. In 2002, Fedoroff was named an Evan Pugh Professor at Penn State and, in 2003, she became a member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research is directed at understanding the genetic organization and molecular dynamics of plant stress and hormone responses. Fedoroff has published two books and numerous papers in scientific journals.
She has served on the editorial boards of the scientific journals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Science , Gene , Plant Journal , and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine , and she chaired the Publications Committee of the Council of the National Academy of Sciences for 6 years. She has served on the board of the International Science Foundation and the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Englehardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow. She has been a member of the Council of the National Academy of Sciences. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Genetics Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Sigma-Aldrich Chemical Company, as well as on the Board of Trustees of BIOSIS. She has been a member of the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation. She is a member of the Science Steering Committee of the Santa Fe Institute.
Fedoroff has been honored with the University of Chicago's Howard Taylor Ricketts Award in 1990, the New York Academy of Sciences's Outstanding Contemporary Woman Scientist award in 1992, Sigma Xi's McGovern Science and Society Medal in 1997, and Syracuse University's Arents Pioneer Medal in 2003. She is a member the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the National Academy of Sciences. Fedoroff was a recipient of a 2006 National Medal of Science, the highest award given by the United States for lifetime achievement in scientific research.