PHILADELPHIA — Beatrice H. Hahn, MD, a professor of Medicine and Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research.
She joins 25 other previously elected Penn Medicine experts.
Members of the 2016 class include winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Wolf Prize, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Fields Medal, the Grammy Award, and the National Book Award.
A native of Germany, Hahn is recognized for her work deciphering the primate origins of human AIDS viruses and malaria parasites. She is known in particular for developing non-invasive methods to study the evolution, biology, and potential of microbes that infect endangered primate species to be transmitted to humans.
Her influential contributions in understanding human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections include developing the first molecular clone of HIV-1, discovering the origins of HIV-1 and HIV-2 in non-human primate species in Africa, determining the pathogenic impact of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) infection on wild chimpanzee populations, and making fundamental observations in the molecular and virologic characterization of numerous HIV and SIV genes and strains. Hahn’s most recent work describes ground-breaking studies identifying the origin of the most deadly form of malaria in West African gorillas, findings that will prompt new research to understand host/pathogen interactions that underlie the transmission and pathogenicity of malaria.
Hahn has published over 300 papers and is a member of many advisory boards, including the HIV/AIDS Program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She also served on the NIH Council of Councils Working Group on the Use of Chimpanzees in NIH-Supported Research. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2002, she was named one of the top 50 women in science by Discover Magazine.
Hahn received her medical degree from the Technical University of Munich and pursued postdoctoral studies in human retrovirology at the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology, National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. She joined the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology at the University of Alabama in 1985, serving as co-director of the Center for AIDS Research from 2003 to 2011. Hahn became a Penn faculty member in 2011.
Among the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows are more than 250 Nobel laureates and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. The entire list of the new members is located here.
The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 8, 2016, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
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