PHILADELPHIA - Marisa Bartolomei, PhD, a professor of Cell & Developmental Biology and co-director of the Epigenetics Program in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been awarded the 2017 Genetics Society Medal. The award recognizes outstanding research contributions to genetics.
Marisa Bartolomei, PhD
Bartolomei will deliver an accompanying lecture and receive the medal next year at the Society, which is based in London. The Genetics Society was founded in 1919 by William Bateson, a biology professor at Cambridge who proposed the term genetics (from the Greek gennÅ, “to give birth") to refer to the study of heredity.
“This is an outstanding achievement and we are enormously proud of Marisa,” said Nancy A. Speck, PhD, chair of the department of Cell and Developmental Biology at Penn. “The Genetics Society is globally recognized as a leading source of genetics’ expertise, and its selection of Marisa speaks volumes about the caliber of her work and achievements.”
Bartolomei’s laboratory focuses on the study of genomic imprinting and X-inactivation in mice. In most cases, people inherit one copy of genes from each parent. But in genomic imprinting, just one of the two versions is activated. One imprinted gene that Bartolomei studies, H19, may help suppress tumors by preventing cancer cells from growing and dividing. In X-inactivation, one of the two copies of the X chromosome in female mammals is inactivated.
Bartolomei received her bachelors degree in biochemistry at the University of Maryland and her doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Shirley Tilghman, now president emerita of Princeton University.
Bartolomei joined Penn as an assistant professor in 1993. In 2006, she received the Society for Women's Health Research Medtronics Prize for Contributions to Women's Health. In 2011 she received a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014 and subsequently elected member-at-large of the Section on Biological Sciences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Bartolomei is a member of the editorial boards of Human Molecular Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology as well as associate editor for PLOS Genetics. She has published approximately 120 papers in peer-reviewed publications.
See the full release here.
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