News

Lis elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Photo of John LisJohn Lis Meyer Cancer Center member John Lis, the Barbara McClintock Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics based in Ithaca, was among three Cornell faculty members recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced April 24. The new class includes 198 leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities and the arts, who will be inducted Oct. 12 at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Lis, who became a faculty member in 1978, develops and uses many strategies to probe the structure of promoters and genes and the regulation of their activities in living cells. His lab investigates these issues through heat shock genes, a highly regulated set of genes that can be manipulated to induce mRNA production. Lis studies factors that participate in the heat shock gene induction response, determines when, where and with whom the factors act during the process of gene activation, and evaluates the functional and structural consequences of rapid inactivation of these factors. The resulting information is critical in establishing molecular models for the various steps in the activation of genes through transcription and coupled RNA processing events.

Lis received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Read the full Cornell Chronicle article.