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Dr. James Broach receives lifetime achievement award

Dr. James Broach, distinguished professor and chair, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, has received a Yeast Genetics Meeting Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions in the field of yeast genetics and outstanding community service. The award was presented at the Yeast Genetics Meeting, part of The Allied Genetics 2016 Conference, July 13-17 in Orlando.

The award is presented to a single investigator every two years. “It recognizes giants in the field and I’m honored to be considered among them,” Broach said.

Broach’s lab has had several notable findings and he's published more than 175 articles. His group was the first to functionally express a human gene – an oncogene – in a yeast cell, which is a way of testing the function of a human gene.

His lab also developed techniques that have evolved into the principle method for mapping human disease genes and was the first group to show that the way DNA is packaged in chromatin determines whether or not the underlying genes are read out.

Dr. James Broach, distinguished professor and chair, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, received this Yeast Genetics Meeting Lifetime Achievement Award in July 2016.

Dr. James Broach, distinguished professor and chair, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, received this Yeast Genetics Meeting Lifetime Achievement Award in July 2016.

Broach received a commemorative glass bowl and was invited to give a talk to the conference about his career.

Broach is also director of the Penn State Institute for Personalized Medicine and professor emeritus of Princeton University. Dr. Broach served on the Scientific Review Board of the Frederick Cancer Center of the National Cancer Institute and has served as a member of both the Genetics and the Genomics Study Sections and chair of the Genomics, Computational Biology and Technology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Broach was Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University from 1984-2012, where he served as associate director of the Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and co-director of the Center for Computational Biology. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is co-director of the Life Sciences Research Foundation, a private organization that provides postdoctoral fellowships in the life sciences. He is a member of the executive committee of the Cancer Biology Training Consortium, a national organization promoting graduate and postdoctoral training in cancer biology.

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