Transposable Element-mediated Structural Variation: From McClintock to Pangenomes
Channel: CIMMYT WebCast
Date: 2022-09-27

by
Susan Wessler
Neil and Rochelle Campbell Presidential Chair for Innovation in Science Education
Distinguished Professor of Genetics
University of California, Riverside
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Susan Wessler is Distinguished Professor of Genetics and the Neil and Rochelle Campbell Chair for Innovation in Science Education at the University of California Riverside. In 2011 she was elected Home Secretary of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the first women to hold this position in its 150-year history. Since her election as NAS Home Secretary in 2011, she has spearheaded initiatives that have led to a doubling of the number of women Academy members.

She is a plant molecular geneticist known for her contributions to the field of transposon biology and plant genome evolution. A native of New York City, she received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cornell University (1980) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1980-1982). She began her career at the University of Georgia in 1983 where she remained until moving to UC Riverside in 2010. 

She is the recipient of several awards including the Stephen Hales Prize (2011) from the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Excellence in Science Award from FASEB (2012), the McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies (2015) and the HudsonAlpha Life Sciences Prize (2019). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1998), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), the American Philosophical Society (2013), and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2017).

 

For further information, please do not hesitate to contact Isabel Peña ( i.pena@cgiar.org )