New Department Head
Science Journal -- Spring 1997 -- Vol 14, No. 1
William R. Jeffery, professor of biology, is the new head of the Department of Biology, succeeding Robert Mitchell, professor of biology, who has served as interim department head since April 1995. "We are pleased that Bill Jeffery has joined us as head of the Department of Biology," says Dean Gregory L. Geoffroy. "He is a distinguished scientist with excellent leadership skills and high standards of excellence."
Jeffery, who previously was a professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California at Davis, has research interests in gene regulation during embryo development, RNA localization during development, the evolution of developmental mechanisms, and molecular evolution. He is setting up a laboratory at Penn State to house six endangered populations of eyeless cave fish that evolved in isolation from each other during the past 100,000 years, with which he plans to study the evolution of eyelessness. He also is known for his research on the development of the ascidian (sea squirt).
Jeffery earned his bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Illinois in 1967, his doctoral degree in cell and developmental biology at the University of Iowa in 1971, and completed two postdoctoral positions in molecular biology, one at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1971 to 1972, and one at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston from 1972 to 1974.
After completing his postdoctoral work, Jeffery joined the University of Houston in 1974 as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemical and Biophysical Sciences. In 1977, he joined the University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in the Department of Zoology where, after a series of promotions, he was named Johann Friedrich Miescher Regent's Professor of Molecular Biology in 1987, a position he held until 1990. During his tenure at the University of Texas at Austin, he was a member of the Genetics Institute from 1978 to 1980 and a member of the Center for Developmental Biology from 1981 to 1990. From 1983 to 1987 he was codirector of the Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Jeffery then joined the University of California at Davis, where he served as professor in the Department of Zoology until 1993, when he became a professor of molecular and cellular biology in the Division of Biological Sciences and the Bodega Marine Laboratory. He also was a visiting professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine from 1995 to 1996.
He is a member of the board of trustees and the past president of the Society for Developmental Biology and a member of the corporation of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. He was chairman of the Cell and Developmental Biology Section of the American Society of Zoologists from 1988 to 1990.
Among his many honors, Jeffery was named the Steps Toward Independence Fellow by the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1975, received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Graduate College of the University of Texas at Austin in 1984, and received the American Society of Zoologists Outstanding Service Award in 1990.
Jeffery is a Fellow of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, a member of Sigma
Xi, and a member of the American
Society for Cell Biology. He is a member of the editorial boards of
nine scientific journals and is the author or coauthor of over 115 published
scientific research papers.