Two University of Iowa faculty members, Pamela Geyer and Amnon Kohen, have been awarded the distinction of 2015 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. The fellows will be formally honored at the AAAS annual meeting in February in Washington, D.C. A total of 347 researchers were named this year.
Pamela Geyer, professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Obstetrics and Gynecology, was selected “for distinguished contributions to the field of eukaryotic transcription, particularly founding discoveries of the insulator class of regulatory elements and mechanisms of tissue-specific gene expression.”
Geyer earned a doctorate from Ohio State University in 1983 and completed her post-doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University. She joined the UI Carver College of Medicine faculty in the fall of 1989. Using fruit fly models, Geyer studies how chromosome organization affects gene expression during development and the role this type of organization plays in human disease. She is currently investigating how genomes are organized by chromatin insulators to establish transcriptional fidelity and how proteins in the nuclear envelope contribute to transcriptional regulation, through studies of LEM domain proteins, which are members of the most conserved eukaryotic class of nuclear envelope proteins.
“The University of Iowa and the Department of Biochemistry have a long list of accomplished faculty members who are AAAS fellows. I am so honored to be elected as a fellow and have my name added to this distinguished group of scholars,” Geyer says.
Amnon Kohen, professor in the Department of Chemistry, was selected for his “distinguished contributions to enzymology, particularly using isotope effects to elucidate the role of protein dynamics in catalysis and identification of new DNA biosynthetic paths.”
Kohen earned his doctorate in 1994 from Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa. He joined the UI chemistry department in 1999 as assistant professor, rising to professor in 2010. He is currently studying the role of protein motions in catalyzing the chemical transformation needed for biological function, the details of different chemical transformations catalyzed by one enzymatic active site, and new biochemical mechanisms for DNA biosynthesis.
“It is a great honor for me to be elected as an AAAS fellow,” Kohen says. “Our department has three fellows, and I always looked up to them.”