Awards, promotions,
fellowships and more

Leustek	Carruthers	Chen	Otten	Partridge	Scott
Siddiqui	Tonge	Ten Hagen	Davidson	Moses	Tonks

ASBMB members elected as 2019 AAAS fellows

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has elected 441 of its members as fellows in recognition of their extraordinary achievements in advancing science. Of those honored, the 12 listed below are members of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The fellows will be recognized at the 2020 AAAS annual meeting in Seattle in February.

Section on Agriculture, Food and Renewable Resources

Thomas Leustek, professor in the department of plant biology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences

Section on Biological Sciences

Vernon B. Carruthers, professor of microbiology and immunology, University of Michigan Medical School

Julian Chen, professor of biochemistry in the school of molecular sciences, Arizona State University

Caryn Elizabeth Outten, Guy F. Lipscomb professor of chemistry, department of chemistry and biochemistry, University of South Carolina

Nicola Partridge, professor, department of basic science and craniofacial biology and departments of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology and medicine, New York University

Emily E. Scott, professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacology, University of Michigan

Aleem Siddiqui, professor of medicine in the school of health sciences, University of California, San Diego

Section on Chemistry

Peter J. Tonge, distinguished professor of chemistry and radiology and director of the center for advanced study of drug action, Stony Brook University

Section on Dentistry and Oral Health Sciences

Kelly G. Ten Hagen, senior investigator, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research/National Institutes of Health

Section on Medical Sciences

Nicholas Davidson, John E. and Adaline Simon professor of medicine and of developmental biology, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Lipid Research

Marsha A. Moses, Julia Dyckman Andrus professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the vascular biology program at Boston Children's Hospital

Section on Pharmaceutical Sciences

Nicholas K. Tonks, Caryl Boies professor of cancer research, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Wand heads department at Texas A&M

Josh Wand has just completed his first semester as head of the department of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University. He was named to the position effective Aug. 1.

Wand was previously the Benjamin Rush professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his department head duties at Texas A&M, Wand is teaching third-year biochemistry to undergraduates and a graduate course in biophysics.

His research looks at the intricacies of how to manipulate protein recognition of other proteins. Over the years, he has focused on the influence of the physical properties of proteins and their function, with an emphasis on how the internal structure of protein molecules fluctuates over time.

Wand is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Biophysical Society. He earned his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and master’s degree in chemistry from Carleton University in Ontario, Canada, and his doctoral degree in biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania.

In memoriam: Michael Rossmann

Purdue University structural biologist Michael G. Rossmann died May 14 at the age of 88.

Rossmann was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1930 and immigrated to England in 1939. There, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of London before receiving his Ph.D. in chemical crystallography from the University of Glasgow in 1956. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Minnesota and a stint as a research assistant at the University of Cambridge, he joined the faculty at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1964, where he would remain for more than five decades.

In 1985, he was the first scientist to map the structure of the common cold on the atomic level with X-ray crystallography. In subsequent decades, Rossmann continued to turn the towering microscopes he helped bring to Purdue on a variety of viruses, including Dengue virus, Zika virus and the giant Mimivirus.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London, Rossmann continued his research career into his final years.

He is survived by his three children, Martin, Alice and Heather and four grandchildren; following his wife Audrey Pearson’s death in 2009, he remarried in 2018 and is survived by his second wife, Karen Bogan.