Don Cleveland, Ph.D., Professor of Medicine, Neurosciences, and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and head of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, has been appointed chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.
"The Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego is already one of the nation's leading departments after only a decade of existence. It's an honor to be chosen to lead the next phase of a department that bridges between basic discoveries in molecular and cellular biology, genetics, and genomics and the use of those discoveries in development of new medical therapies," Cleveland said.
|
|
|
Don Cleveland, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
|
A former head of the Biomedical Sciences Graduate program, the major graduate program in the Health Sciences at UC San Diego, Cleveland is well known for his contributions to graduate education. His pioneering discoveries of the mechanisms of chromosome movement and cell-cycle control during normal cellular division, as well as of the principles of neuronal cell development and their relationship to the defects that contribute to inherited neurodegenerative disease, led to his being named to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. Cleveland received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Princeton. Following his post-doctoral work at UC San Francisco, he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine until joining UC San Diego in 1995.
He has been an Editor of the Journal of Cell Biology for the last 17 years, and was Editor of Current Opinion in Cell Biology for nearly a decade. He regularly serves as a reviewer for many first-tier journals such as Science, Cell, Nature, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience and Journal of Clinical Investigation. He is a sought-after lecturer and has been keynote speaker at the annual meetings of the Society for Neuroscience, the American Society for Cell Biology, and the American Academy of Neurology.
The Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine was first established as an autonomous Division in 1990 and was departmentalized in 1999, with the mission of supporting and promoting research and teaching in molecular cell biology in the School of Medicine. One of only two basic science departments in the School of Medicine, it comprises 23 faculty members, more than 100 postdoctoral scholars and 50 graduate students, as well close to 80 staff members. Research funding to department faculty members totaled close to $20 million in the past year.
# # #
Media Contact: Debra Kain, 619-543-6163, ddkain@ucsd.edu