Leo Nicholas Ornston (born 1940) is an American microbiologist who researched the evolution of microbes. He was a faculty member at
Yale University from 1969–2011, where he was made the director of its Center for Biological Transformation. He has held the position of
editor-in-chief at ''
Applied and Environmental Microbiology'' and of co-editor at ''
Annual Review of Microbiology''.
Early life and education
Leo Nicholas Ornston was born in 1940 in
Philadelphia.
He was named after his paternal grandfather, who was an immigrant from Russia to Philadelphia. His father Darius was a physician,
and his mother Marie Wallace Ornston was a teacher. He had an elder brother, also named Darius, and two elder sisters, Mary Gray and Lenore. He and his siblings attended
Germantown Friends School
Germantown Friends School (GFS) is a coeducational independent PreK–12 school in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States under the supervision of Germantown Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Fri ...
, a
Quaker
Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of Christian denomination, denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belie ...
school in Philadelphia. For college, he attended
Harvard University, where he was at first in a pre-medical track. For graduate school, he attended the
University of California, Berkeley in the laboratory of
Roger Stanier. He then did post-doctoral research in Leicester with
Hans Kornberg and then at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with
Irwin Gunsalus
Irwin C. "Gunny" Gunsalus (June 29, 1912 – October 25, 2008) was an American biochemist who discovered lipoic acid, a vitamin-like substance (an enzyme cofactor) that has been used as a treatment for chronic liver disease, and pyridoxal pho ...
.
Career
Ornston became a faculty member at
Yale University in 1969. There, he researched the evolution of
microbe
A microorganism, or microbe,, ''mikros'', "small") and ''organism'' from the el, ὀργανισμός, ''organismós'', "organism"). It is usually written as a single word but is sometimes hyphenated (''micro-organism''), especially in olde ...
s by examining their
metabolic pathways.
While at Yale, he was the director of its first industry-subsidized research project, supported by
Celanese. He was also made the director of its Center for Biological Transformation, the goals of which were to understand the fundamental nature of genetic mutation and apply those findings to engineer bacteria that could metabolize toxic pollutants.
Starting in 1983, he was the editor of the ''
Annual Review of Microbiology'', succeeding
Mortimer P. Starr. He retired from the editor position in 2007, at which time he was succeeded by
Susan Gottesman
Susan Gottesman is a microbiologist at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is part of the National Institutes of Health.
Gottesman has been the editor of the ''Annual Review of Microbiology'' since 2008.
She is a pioneer in the area of ...
. He was also the editor of the ''
Applied and Environmental Microbiology''.
Ornston retired from Yale in 2011.
Awards and honors
Ornston received a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in 1973 for his work in molecular and cellular biology.
Personal life
Ornston's first marriage was to May Kihara in 1963, whom he met at Berkeley. Together they had one child. Following his divorce from Kihara, he married Donna Parke in 1976,
with whom he had another child.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ornston, Leo Nicholas
Living people
1940 births
Scientists from Philadelphia
Harvard University alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Yale University faculty
American microbiologists
American people of Russian descent
Annual Reviews (publisher) editors