Jodi Nunnari was elected by ASCB members to serve as ASCB President in 2018. Nunnari, Professor and Chair of the Department of
Jodi Nunnari
Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Davis, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cell
Biology, will serve on the Executive Committee as President-Elect in 2017.
Also elected to Council were Angelika Amon, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Bob Goldstein, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Erika Holzbaur, University of Pennsylvania; and Wallace F. Marshall, University of California, San Francisco. Each member of Council will serve a three-year term beginning January 1, 2017. All four new Council members have been long-time ASCB supporters.
Nunnari has been an active ASCB leader and volunteer who served on the ASCB Annual Meeting Program Committee for four years, has been a member of the Public Policy Committee since 2011 and the Finance and Audit Committee since 2015, and was Program Committee Chair in 2010. In 2014 she was elected to the ASCB Council, on which she currently serves.
Nunnari earned her PhD in pharmacology at Vanderbilt University in Lee Limbird’s lab. She has been investigating mitochondrial cell biology since her postdoc in Peter Walter’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco. As a postdoc, Nunnari was among the first to use GFP to visualize mitochondria in yeast, and helped establish the field of mitochondrial dynamics. Now the Nunnari lab uses cutting-edge microscopy to understand how mitochondrial structure is established and maintained, and how the mitochondrial genome is organized and segregated during division.
Pietro De Camilli, ASCB President-Elect and Professor at Yale University, commended his successor. “Jodi Nunnari is a stellar scientist, whose work on cell biology of mitochondria had a transformational impact in the field. With her vision and impressive energy she will be a most effective leader of the Society.”
The membership also voted to accept the changes to the Bylaws. Graduate students now have the right to vote in Society elections, and a new Educator membership category has been created for community college instructors and high school teachers.
The ASCB thanks the Nominating Committee members for their service: Chair Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Peter Devreotes, Dan Fletcher, Dan Kiehart, Ruth Lehmann, Satyajit Mayor, and Clare Waterman.
Of the ASCB eligible voting membership, 1,617 participated in the election this year, up from 1,546 last year.
About the Author:
Thea Clarke is the Director of Communications and Education at the American Society for Cell Biology.
