Julian Schroeder and Russell Lande Elected to National Academy of Sciences

April 29, 2015

By Kim McDonald

Julian Schroeder

Julian Schroeder, distinguished professor of biology and co-director of UC San Diego Center for Food and Fuel for the 21st Century, and Russell Lande, an emeritus professor of biology who is now a Royal Society Research Professor at Imperial College London, were among five professors at UC San Diego recently elected to membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors bestowed on U.S. scientists and engineers.

Harvey Karten of the School of Medicine and Jeff Severinghaus and Lisa Tauxe of Scripps Institution of Oceanography were among the other 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from UC San Diego elected to the academy this year "in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research."

They join 103 living and deceased members of the UC San Diego faculty who previously had been named to membership in the academy, which was established by Congress in 1863 to serve as an official adviser to the federal government on matters of science and technology.

Schroeder, a member of the Section of Cell and Developmental Biology, has been faculty member in the Division of Biological Sciences since 1990 and pioneered the characterization of ion channels in higher plants. His laboratory later turned its research focus toward identifying the basic molecular mechanisms by which plants respond to and mount resistance to abiotic stresses.

Schroeder, who holds the Novartis Chair in Plant Sciences, is president of the American Society of Plant Biologists, a professional society of over 4,000 members devoted to the advancement of the plant sciences, and director of the Plant Systems Biology Graduate Training program at UC San Diego. He received the Charles Albert Shull Award from ASPB, a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the Deutsche Forshungsgemeinshaft Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Research Priz, and the Blasker Award in Environmental Science and Engineering. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

After growing up on the East Coast, Schroeder pursued his undergraduate studies in physics at the University of Göttingen and completed his MS and PhD in biophysics and physics at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany.

Russell Lande

Lande, a faculty member in the Section of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, pioneered the field of quantitative genetics and phenotypic evolution in natural populations with a series of theoretical papers on mutation and maintenance of heritable variation, sexual dimorphism and sexual selection, life history evolution, phenotypic plasticity, plant mating systems and the measurement of natural selection on correlated characters.

Major research universities use the number of academy members on their faculty as a benchmark by which to compare the strength of their scientific research and education programs among universities across the nation in different disciplines. A list of this year's new members is available at News from the National Academy of Sciences .