AAAS council elects CSHL’s Leemor Joshua-Tor a 2012 AAAS Fellow

Joshua-Tor’s lab studies the molecular basis of cell regulatory processes by using the tools of structural biology and biochemistry to examine proteins and protein complexes associated with these processes. Efforts largely center on nucleic-acid regulation including the process of RNA interference (RNAi) and DNA replication initiation in papillomaviruses. In addition to her research, Joshua-Tor was the Dean of the Watson School of Biosciences at CSHL from 2007-2012 and is a member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) external working group on the future biomedical workforce.

The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the Association’s 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with the nominee's institution), or by the AAAS chief executive officer. Each steering group then reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and a final list is forwarded to the AAAS Council, which votes on the aggregate list. The Council is the policymaking body of the Association, chaired by the AAAS president, and consisting of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division, and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org) among other periodicals.

November
28 2012

CSHL Professor Nicholas Tonks, Ph.D., F.R.S., has been named a Vallee Visiting Professor, a distinction conferred upon scientists by the Bert L. and N. Kuggie Vallee Foundation who have “a demonstrated record of exceptional creativity, originality, and leadership, and sustained success at an elite level.”

Professor Tonks, a biochemist and molecular biologist, is well known for having laid the foundations for the identification and functional characterization of a superfamily of 107 regulatory enzymes called protein tyrosine phosphatases, or PTPs. Protein phosphatases recognize phosphorylated amino acid residues and function to remove them; their action is thus complementary to the class of protein kinases, which add phosphate groups to amino acid residues. Together they play crucial roles in myriad cell-signaling, or signal-transduction, pathways. Read More

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