Hogan elected to Royal Society
As a student at the University of Cambridge in England, Brigid L. M. Hogan, Ph.D., imagined being elected to the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy. This week, her dream became reality.
Hogan, Hortense B. Ingram Professor of Molecular Oncology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, joins the ranks of an organization which has counted as Fellows the eminent scientists Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Francis Crick, and James Watson. Fellowship of the Royal Society is recognized worldwide as a sign of the highest regard in science.
“I’m thrilled; it’s absolutely fantastic,” Hogan said.
The Royal Society, founded in 1660, is the United Kingdom’s independent national academy – akin to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. It represents the British scientific community within Britain and throughout the world, leading the public debate on issues such as stem cell research, genetically modified plants and animals, and the consequences of sequencing the human genome.
Hogan is a pioneer in identifying how genes function in the developing mouse embryo. She also is a respected spokesperson on issues concerning embryo manipulation, stem cells, and cloning.
Before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 1988, Hogan was head of the Laboratory of Molecular Embryology-first at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and then at the National Institute of Medical Research in London. She is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and recipient of the Medical Center’s Charles R. Park Faculty Research Award.