Caltech Biology Professor Earns Prestigious Genetics Society Award

Paul Sternberg, the Bren Professor of Biology, has received the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal from The Genetics Society of America (GSA). The award, given for lifetime contributions to the field of genetics, is named after Nobel Laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan, who founded the Division of Biology at Caltech (now the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering) in 1928.

Throughout his career, Sternberg’s research has utilized the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode or roundworm, to make advances in genetics, developmental biology, evolution, neuroscience, and disease research. He has taken a leading role in developing information resources such as WormBase for C. elegans, the Alliance of Genome Resources, and the Gene Ontology Consortium; he co-founded microPublication Biology, a short-format, peer-reviewed journal that seeks to make scholarly communication effective and compatible with knowledge bases. The GSA recognizes Sternberg for “his lifelong commitment to the open sharing of data across biomedical research.”

“I am truly honored to be recognized in this way by my peer geneticists,” Sternberg says. “Genetics has always been my favorite way of reverse engineering complex living systems because of its combination of the elegant and the practical.”

Sternberg joined the Caltech faculty in 1987. He is an affiliated faculty member with the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.

Several former Caltech faculty members have previously won the award, including Norman Horowitz in 1998, Ed Lewis in 1983, George Beadle in 1984, Ray Owen in 1993, and Seymour Benzer in 1986. Caltech alumni have also received the award, including Matthew Meselson (PhD ’57) in 1995, former postdoctoral scholar Franklin Stahl in 1996, Ira Herskowitz (BS ’67 in 2002, and David Hogness (BS ’49, PhD ’53) in 2003.