Elliot Meyerowitz (born May 22, 1951) is an American biologist.

Career

Meyerowitz did his undergraduate work at Columbia University (A.B. in biology, 1973), where he worked part-time in the laboratory of Cyrus Levinthal on combined microscopic and computational methods for tracing axons and dendritic trees in the nervous systems of fish. His graduate work was in the Department of Biology at Yale University (Ph.D. 1977), where he worked in the laboratory of Douglas Kankel on the interaction of eye and brain development in Drosophila, by use of genetic mosaics. From 1977 to 1979 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of David Hogness in the Biochemistry Department at the

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

School of Medicine, developing and using methods for the molecular cloning of genes in the early days of gene cloning and genomics. Since 1980 he has been a faculty member in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, where he served as division chair from 2000 to 2010, and where he is now George W. Beadle Professor of Biology. Between 2011 and 2013, he was appointed as inaugural director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and elected into a professorship in the university, and a professorial fellow at Trinity College, while on leave from the California Institute of Technology. Meyerowitz was a '' Drosophila melanogaster'' expert before he became a pioneer of ''

Arabidopsis thaliana ''Arabidopsis thaliana'', the thale cress, mouse-ear cress or arabidopsis, is a small flowering plant native to Eurasia and Africa. ''A. thaliana'' is considered a weed; it is found along the shoulders of roads and in disturbed land. A winter a ...

'' research. Dr. Meyerowitz is well known for his contributions on the genetic and molecular basis of plant hormone reception, and on the molecular mechanisms of pattern formation during flower and shoot apical meristem development. More recently, he has turned his attention to physical models of shoot morphogenesis. Many leaders in plant biology trained in his laboratory, including

Xuemei Chen Xuemei Chen (; born 1966) is a Chinese-American molecular biologist. She is the Furuta Chair Professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. She was elected to the US National Academy of Scienc ...

, Steven E. Jacobsen, Martin F. Yanofsky, John L. Bowman, and Detlef Weigel. Meyerowitz is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the U.S.

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

(1995), and the American Philosophical Society (1998), and is a foreign member of the French Académie des Sciences (2002) and the Royal Society (2004). Among the awards he has received are the

Genetics Society of America The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is a scholarly membership society of more than 5,500 genetics researchers and educators, established in 1931. The Society was formed from the reorganization of the Joint Genetics Sections of the American Soc ...

Medal in 1996, the

International Prize The Fyssen Foundation (French: Fondation Fyssen) is a French charitable organization that was established and endowed in 1979 by H. Fyssen. The aim of the foundation is to stimulate research into the processes underlying and leading to cognition ...

for Biology from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 1997, the Richard Lounsbery Award from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1999, the Wilbur Cross Medal of Yale University in 2001, the

Harrison Prize The International Society of Developmental Biologists (ISDB), formerly the Institut Internationale d'Embryologie (IIE), is a non-profit scientific association promoting developmental biology. The society holds an international Congress every four y ...

of the International Society of Developmental Biologists in 2005 and the

Balzan Prize The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four annual monetary prizes to people or organizations who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, culture, as well as for endeavours for peace and the br ...

for "Plant Molecular Genetics" in 2006 (with

Chris R. Somerville Christopher Roland Somerville is a Canadian-American biologist known as a pioneer of ''Arabidopsis thaliana'' research. Somerville is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and a Program Officer at the Open Philanthr ...

). He is a member of the editorial board of eight leading journals in genetics, genomics, and developmental biology, and has served as president of the International Society for Plant Molecular Biology (1995–1997), the Genetics Society of America (1999) and the Society for Developmental Biology (2005–2006).

ABC model of flower development The ABC model of flower development is a scientific model of the process by which flowering plants produce a pattern of gene expression in meristems that leads to the appearance of an organ oriented towards sexual reproduction, a flower. There a ...

History of research on Arabidopsis thaliana ''Arabidopsis thaliana'' is a first class model organism and the single most important species for fundamental research in plant molecular genetics. ''A. thaliana'' was the first plant for which a high-quality reference genome sequence was determin ...

References

External links

Photo
Elliot Meyerowitz's iBiology Seminars: "Why we Need to Understand Plant Development?"
(2015)
Google scholar profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Meyerowitz, Elliot 1951 births Foreign Members of the Royal Society Jewish American scientists Living people Richard-Lounsbery Award laureates Members of the French Academy of Sciences Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge California Institute of Technology faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences 21st-century American biologists 21st-century American Jews

Career

Related pages

References

External links