Four New Members Appointed to NAGMS Council

by Danielle Wittenberg
February 11, 2000

HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala has appointed four new members to the National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council. They are John N. Abelson, Ph.D., of the California Institute of Technology; Jay C. Dunlap, Ph.D., of Dartmouth Medical School; D. Amy Trainor, Ph.D., of AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals; and Richard M. Weinshilboum, M.D., of the Mayo Medical School.

The council, which meets three times a year, is composed of leaders in the biological and medical sciences, education, health care and public affairs. Its members, who are appointed for four-year terms, review applications for research and research training grants that have been assigned to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).

The members make recommendations to the secretary of Health and Human Services, to the director of the National Institutes of Health and to the director of NIGMS on policy matters, areas of research importance and personnel needs in fields of science related to NIGMS' programs.

Dr. Abelson is the George Beadle Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He has served on a number of journal editorial boards and has been the editor in chief of Methods in Enzymology since 1986. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. Dr. Abelson earned a B.S. in physics from Washington State University in Pullman and a Ph.D. in biophysics from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. His research focuses on the mechanism of RNA splicing.

Dr. Dunlap is chair of the newly created department of genetics at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H. He also serves as president of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. He chaired the 1998 Gordon Research Conference on Cellular and Molecular Mycology, and he has served as editor in chief of Advances in Genetics since 1992. Dr. Dunlap's research on the molecular mechanisms of biological clocks was honored with the 1991 Honma International Prize for Biological Rhythms Research. He earned a B.S. in chemistry and oceanography from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Trainor is the global product director, CNS (central nervous system), at AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company in Wilmington, Del., where she leads the development of new drugs for the treatment of neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. She serves on the Chemical Sciences Roundtable of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1996, she was co-chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Bioorganic Chemistry. She is an active member of the American Chemical Society and is the chair-elect of the organization's Medicinal Chemistry Division. A co-inventor on over 20 U.S. patents, Dr. Trainor earned a B.S. in chemistry from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

Dr. Weinshilboum is a professor of pharmacology and medicine at the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minn., where he has served as director for research and director for education of the Mayo Foundation. He is an active member of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics and served as president of the organization in 1986 and 1987. Dr. Weinshilboum earned a B.A. in chemistry and zoology from the University of Kansas in Lawrence and an M.D. from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Kansas City. His research interests center on pharmacogenetics--the role of inheritance in individual variations in drug response and in the occurrence of adverse drug reactions.

A component of NIH, one of the Public Health Service agencies within HHS, NIGMS funds research and research training in the basic biomedical sciences. This support enables scientists at universities, medical schools and research institutions to expand knowledge about the fundamental life processes that underlie human health and disease.