News Release

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Three NIH Scientists Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Three National Institutes of Health scientists have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose members include some of the world's most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts.

The scientists are Dr. Gisela T. Storz, a senior investigator and deputy director of the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD); Dr. Joseph Francis Fraumeni, Jr., Director, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics in the National Cancer Institute (NCI); and Dr. Okihide Hikosaka, senior researcher and chief of the Section of Neuronal Networks in the Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research in the National Eye Institute.

"The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has a long tradition of recognizing scientists and cultural figures whose work has had great impact on their fields and on intellectual life in the United States," said Dr. Michael Gottesman, deputy director for intramural research at the NIH. "Drs. Fraumeni, Storz, and Hikosaka are especially deserving of this high recognition by their colleagues because of the quality and significance of their scientific contributions. The NIH is enormously proud of their accomplishments."

Dr. Storz received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. She carried out post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Sankar Adhya at the National Cancer Institute and in the laboratory of Dr. Fred Ausubel at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is currently a senior investigator and deputy director of the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program and the chief of the Section on Environmental Gene Regulation.. The section has long been studying the problem of how bacteria perceive changes in their environment and then convert these signals into changes in gene expression and cell metabolism. In recent years, the group has been particularly interested in regulatory roles of very small RNAs and small proteins that previously were unknown.

Dr. Storz has received many awards and honors, including the Eli Lilly Award of the American Society of Microbiology and the NIH Director’s Award. Dr. Storz has mentored multiple postdoctoral and predoctoral fellows as well as high school and undergraduate summer students, and received an NIH Distinguished Mentor Award. She is also an elected member of the American Academy of Microbiology and serves on the editorial board of the NIH Catalyst. In addition to many scientific publications, commentaries and book chapters, she is a co-author of a text book entitled Molecular Biology: Principles of Genome Function.

Dr. Fraumeni is a cancer epidemiologist who has unraveled environmental and genetic determinants of cancer. Since 1995, he has served as the director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, leading research efforts and training many of the world’s cancer epidemiologists. His work in genetics includes the discovery, with his colleague Frederick Li, of a familial multiple-cancer syndrome associated with inherited mutations in the p53 tumor suppressor gene. The condition, which affects children and young adults, is now known as Li-Fraumeni syndrome.

Dr. Fraumeni has received many honors, including the Abraham Lilienfeld Award from the American College of Epidemiology, the John Snow Award from the American Public Health Association, the James D. Bruce Memorial Award from the American College of Physicians, the Nathan Davis Award from the American Medical Association, the Charles S. Mott Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, and the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor. Dr. Fraumeni is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the Association of American Physicians. His wide-ranging research contributions are documented in over 800 scientific publications, including the definitive textbook (co-edited with David Schottenfeld) entitled Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention.

Dr. Hikosaka received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1973 and 1978 and did postdoctoral work at the NEI Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research (LSR)(http://www.nei.nih.gov/intramural/lsr.asp) from 1979 to 1982. He held faculty positions at Toho University School of Medicine in Tokyo, the National Institute of Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, and Juntendo University School of Medicine in Tokyo before returning to the LSR in 2002 as a senior investigator. Dr. Hikosaka’s research involves the control of eye movements, functions of the basal ganglia, neural mechanisms of motivation, neural mechanisms of procedural learning, and mechanisms of spatial attention.

Dr. Hikosaka has received many awards, including the Tsukahara Memorial Award and the Tokizane Toshihiko Memorial Award. He also serves on the editorial boards of Trends in Cognitive Sciences and Current Opinion in Neurobiology. In addition, he has written more than 100 papers, several reviews, and contributed to more than 30 book sections.

Other inductees into the 2011 class of fellows include documentary film maker Ken Burns; singer-songwriter Paul Simon; and Roberta Ramo, the first woman to serve as president of the American Bar Association.

Since its founding in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots, the Academy has elected leading thinkers and doers from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on Oct. 1, 2011 at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

A list of the new Academy members announced today is located at: http://www.amacad.org/news/alphalist2011.pdf .

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

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