The new UCSF members are: Cornelia I. Bargmann, PhD, professor and vice chair of anatomy and an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at UCSF; John D. Baxter, MD, professor of medicine in the UCSF Diabetes Center; Cynthia J. Kenyon, PhD, the Herbert Boyer Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and director of the Hillblom Center for the Biology Aging; Robert M. Stroud, PhD, professor of biochemistry and biophysics and of pharmaceutical chemistry; and Arthur Weiss, MD, PhD, Ephraim P. Engleman Distinguished Professor in Rheumatology, chief of the division of rheumatology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF

All five have appointments in the UCSF School of Medicine. Stroud also has an appointment in the School of Pharmacy.

The new members were elected to the prestigious Academy for their "distinguished and continuing achievements in original research."

Cornelia Bargmann studies how genetics and development of the nervous system contribute to specific behaviors. Focusing on olfaction, or the sense of smell in the tiny nematode known as C. elegans, her research has clarified the specific neurons and the specific mechanisms within these neurons that allow the worm to discriminate between different odors in its environment. She has also examined the genetic regulation of social behavior in the worms, and recently identified for the first time a molecule that directs neurons to form connections with each other during an animal's early development creating synapses essential to all behavior.

John Baxter is an expert on the endocrine system and metabolism. In 1979, he cloned the gene for human growth hormone, which later was only the second geneti
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Contact: Wallace Ravven
wravven@pubaff.ucsf.edu
415-476-2557
University of California - San Francisco
1-May-2003