Biosciences News

At the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C., on February 17, ALD for Biosciences Mary Maxon spoke and served on a panel as part of a session on “Overcoming the STEM-Policy Divide with Fellowships in State Governments.” Her talk reported on a 2018 study of PhD and MD California Science & Technology (S&T) Policy Fellows who served one-year appointments as full-time staffers in the California Legislature. The fellowships were supported by a grant to the California Council on S&T from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The study found that S&T fellows help policymakers understand complex policy issues and make better-informed decisions about them, and that S&T fellowships tend to boost legislative fellows’ professional opportunities. Maxon was instrumental in developing the California S&T Policy Fellows program.

Congratulations to William Jagust, senior faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division, for winning the 2018 Radical Ideas in Brain Science Challenge, made possible through the generosity of Berkeley Brain Initiative donors. Jagust, who is also Professor of Public Health at UC Berkeley, will receive up to $190,000 over two years to investigate the degradation of the blood-brain barrier as a potential paradigm-shifting culprit in Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Patrick Shih, JBEI’s Director of Plant Biosystems Design who also serves as an assistant professor at the department of plant biology at UC Davis and is a Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) affiliate, was recently selected as a 2019 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology.

Shih, will use this fellowship to help fund his research to reconstruct the evolution of photosynthesis, a process that originated billions of years ago.

Read more in the UC Davis News Center.

Todd Pray, Program Head of the Advanced Biofuels & Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU), has accepted the position of Head of Berkeley Lab’s Strategic Partnership Office effective March 1, 2019.

UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab scientists have expanded the CRISPR gene-editing toolkit with the addition of a new, compact CRISPR-associated (Cas) protein—the RNA-guided “scissors” that snip DNA—and a modification of the Cas9 protein to give it an “on” switch for better control.