John Schimenti, PhD, the director of the Center for Vertebrate Genomics at Cornell University, presented a HudsonAlpha Research Seminar on January 24 titled “Genetics of infertility and genome maintenance in mammalian germ cell development.”
Dr. Schimenti is the James Law Professor of Genetics at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, with appointments in the departments of Biomedical Sciences and Molecular Biology and Genetics. He also serves as director of the Center for Vertebrate Genomics at Cornell. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Rutgers College with majors in English and biological sciences in 1981 and his PhD in developmental biology from the University of Cincinnati in 1985. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton studying genetics of male fertility in mice, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics at Case Western Reserve University in 1987. In 1992, he moved to The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he was a senior staff scientist, before relocating to Cornell in 2004. Dr. Schimenti has served as a permanent member of the Eukaryotic Genetics review panel at the National Science Foundation, a member of the Mammalian Genetics study section at NIH, the secretariat of the International Mammalian Genome Society, a member of the board of directors of the Genetics Society of America, and a member of the the GCAT (Genome, Computation and Technology) study section at NIH. Recognitions include the Searle Scholars Award, the March of Dimes Basil O’Connor award, Presidential Young Investigator of the National Science Foundation, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the SUNY Chancellor Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Much of his research has concerned the genetics of cancer, genome maintenance and gametogenesis using the lab mouse as a model for gene discovery, emphasizing the mechanisms of meiosis.
Greg Barsh, MD, PhD, a HudsonAlpha faculty investigator, hosted the seminar. The next seminar, featuring Philip M. Farrell, MD, PhD, an emeritus dean and professor in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin, will be held on Tuesday, February 6, at noon in the HudsonAlpha auditorium. More information on HudsonAlpha Research Seminars, including an upcoming schedule, can be found at hudsonalpha.org/seminars.
