Dominique Bergmann, John Pringle and Anne Villeneuve are now part of an organization designed to advise the nation on issues related to science and technology.
Three Stanford researchers are among the 84 newly elected members of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new members from Stanford are Dominique Bergmann, PhD, professor of biology; John Pringle, PhD, professor of genetics; and Anne Villeneuve, PhD, professor of developmental biology and of genetics.
Bergmann, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, began efforts as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford to establish stomatal cells as a model for developmental studies in plants. Her lab now focuses on these cells to learn about cell fate, stem-cell self-renewal and cell specialization.
Pringle uses yeast genetics to discover general principles of cell-polarity development, cytokinesis and the septin cytoskeleton. He and his group study cell-cycle control, cellular morphogenesis, and cell-division mechanisms in yeast and other simple eukaryotic model organisms.
Villeneuve investigates the mechanisms underlying the faithful inheritance of eukaryotic chromosomes. Her primary focus is on elucidating the events required for orderly segregation of homologous chromosomes during meiosis, the crucial process that reduces the number of chromosomes in a parent cell by half and produces four gamete cells.
The academy is a private, nonprofit institution that was created in 1863 to advise the nation on issues related to science and technology. Scholars are elected in recognition of their outstanding contributions to research. This year’s election brings the total of active academy members to 2,290.