Three faculty members associated with the Indiana University Department of Biology in Bloomington have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an honor that recognizes their outstanding contributions to the progress of science and research.
The 2019 fellows and their AAAS citations of merit are:
Brian R. Calvi, professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology, uses fruit flies—or Drosophila—as a model system to discover how cells regulate their division and the copying of their DNA, including how aberrations in these processes can cause disease, such as developmental malformations and cancer. Most recently, he was awarded over $1.2 million by the NIH to study the regulation of cell division and growth and their relationship to genome instability in cancer. He also serves as a co-director of FlyBase—a consortium of IU, Harvard, and Cambridge University—which is the world's most comprehensive database of fruit fly DNA sequence data.
AAAS citation of merit: For distinguished contributions to the field of developmental genetics that helped shape our understanding of the control of DNA replication during the cell cycle.
Justin P. Kumar, professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology, is a developmental biologist who uses the compound eye of fruit flies to understand how signaling pathways, transcriptional networks and epigenetic enzymes guide multipotent cells—or cells with the capacity to develop into multiple cell types—to their final form during development. Due to the conservation of these processes across species—from flies to humans—his work has also helped inform understanding of several congenital disorders that affect the human eye, such as the absence of the iris, or aniridia, and the absence of the eyes, or anophthalmia.
AAAS citation of merit: For groundbreaking and trendsetting contributions in Drosophila eye development, which represent fundamental research on ontogenetic pathways having major implications for certain human visual system diseases.
Michael VanNieuwenhze, the Standiford H. Cox Professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Chemistry and an affiliate professor in the College's Department of Biology, is a chemist specializing in the chemistry and biology of bacterial cell wall biosynthesis. His research focuses on developing methods to visualize the dynamics of bacterial cell wall biosynthesis and bacterial cell division, as well as the study of peptide antibiotics that inhibit the bacterial cell wall biosynthetic pathway. This work includes developing a new class of fluorescent D-amino acids, which have helped revolutionize the study of bacterial cell wall biosynthesis at the molecular level as well as its role in bacterial cell division.
AAAS citation of merit: For distinguished contributions to the fields of chemistry and bacterial cell biology, particularly for methods to visualize bacterial cell wall biosynthesis and bacterial cell division.
Founded in 1848, AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. The election of the above faculty members plus six others from Indiana University Bloomington brings the number of AAAS fellows affiliated with IU to 120, with more than half (72) in the past 13 years.
Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. The fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the Nov. 28 issue of the journal Science.
This article is republished in part from Indiana University's News at IU Bloomington Science and Technology.
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