Michael Levine, professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, has been named the first holder of the $500,000 endowed Chancellor's Associates Chair (IV).
Levine's appointment is effective immediately and will continue until he ceases to hold a full-time, tenured professorship at UCSD. Funds for all five Chancellor's Associates Chairs are unrestricted and set aside to recruit or retain
exceptional faculty members.
"I am delighted that Professor Levine was selected to hold this Chancellor's Associates Chair" said Chancellor Richard C. Atkinson. "With the recognized excellence of our Biology Department, it is a tribute to Professor Levine that he is the first member of the department named to an endowed chair."
Levine, who joined the UCSD faculty in 1991, has been trying to find out how patterns are formed in living organisms--one of the fundamental questions in the field of developmental biology. In essence, the goal of developmental biology is to determine how a single cell--the fertilized egg--forms a complex individual composed of different and highly complex tissues and organs.
Levine has devoted most of his career studying Drosophila melanogaster (the fruitfly) to identify the "master regulatory" genes that control development.
"Interestingly, many of the genes that control the fruitfly embryo are evolutionarily conserved and have been implicated in the embryonic development of a wide variety of organisms, including humans," he said.
Among other things, Levine will use some of the funds from the endowed Chair to start a new research project involving a marine organism called Ascidians, or sea squirts. Originally considered a primitive species (thought by Aristotle to be little more than mollusc), scientists have learned that sea squirt
embryos actually are quite sophisticated.
Like a frog or juvenile fish, they have a tadpole stage. Like vertebrates, they feature a structure similar to a backbone called a notochord around which a spinal column, muscles and organs are organized.
What's more, the tadpole is composed of only about 1,000 cells, making it far easier to study than say, a frog, which is built from hundreds of thousands of cells. In fact, the notochord of a sea squirt consists of a mere 40 cells.
"We can therefore follow every one of these cells from their beginning," said Levine. "We can follow the origins of each of the cells that make up the notochord, from the very beginning, right at fertilization."
Insights gained from such studies could help scientists learn more about how higher organisms develop, which ultimately could be important for understanding what happens when such processes go awry in humans.
"How a fruitfly is patterned, how a sea squirt embryo is patterned, is directly relevant to people, " said Levine.
Prior to joining UCSD, for about seven years Levine was a professor and assistant professor of biology at Columbia University. His honors include a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Searle Scholars Research Fellowship, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.
Levine has published more than 80 research articles, book chapters and reviews; he also is managing editor of Development; on the editorial board of Cell and Genes and Development; and is a director of the embryology course at the Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, Mass.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Levine obtained his bachelor's degree in biology from UC Berkeley in 1976 and his Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale in 1981. From 1982 to 1983 he was a postdoctoral fellow in Switzerland; the following year he returned as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.
Media Contact: Warren R. Froelich, (619) 534-8564
