Jodi Nunnari was elected by American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) members to serve as ASCB President in 2018. Nunnari, Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Davis, and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Cell Biology, will serve as President-Elect on the Executive Committee in 2017.
Nunnari has been an active ASCB leader and volunteer who served on the ASCB Annual Meeting Program Committee for four years, the Public Policy Committee since 2011, the Finance and Audit Committee since 2015, and was Program Committee Chair in 2010. She was also elected to the ASCB Council in 2014, on which she currently serves.
“I am committed to ASCB’s mission to promote scientific excellence and to advocate for basic biological discovery research. I will work to continue the outstanding advocacy and outreach efforts of the ASCB. I will help to create and capitalize on new opportunities to educate the public about the importance of research and to help reform policy to maximize support for the research efforts of ASCB members,” Nunnari wrote in her election statement.
Nunnari earned her Bachelor’s in Chemistry from the College of Wooster in Ohio and 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 mitochondria structure is established and maintained, and how its 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.”
About the Author:
Christina Szalinski is a science writer with a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Pittsburgh.
