Marine Biological Laboratory

The Joe L. Martinez, Jr. & James G. Townsel Endowed Lectureship

7/7/09 - 6:00 PM, Speck Auditorium

"Explorations of a 'Simple' Olfactory System"
John Hildebrand, University of Arizona

John G. Hildebrand is Regents Professor, Director of the Division of Neurobiology of the Arizona Research Laboratories, and Professor of Neurobiology, Biochemistry, Entomology, and Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Hildebrand was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942. He earned the A.B. degree (magna cum laude in biology) at Harvard College in 1964 and the Ph.D. degree (in biochemistry) at The Rockefeller University in 1969, under the mentorship of Profs. Leonard Spector and Fritz Lipmann. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation and the A.P. Sloan Foundation in the Department of Neurobiology of Harvard Medical School, where he worked with Prof. Edward Kravitz.

Before joining the University of Arizona in 1985 to establish and direct the Division of Neurobiology, Dr. Hildebrand was a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University (1980-1985), an Adjunct Professor at The Rockefeller University (1981-1986), and a member of the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School (1970-1980). He has served as a Trustee (1981-1989) and member of the Executive Committee (1982-1988) of the MBL Board of Trustees. He also served as a Trustee of the The Rockefeller University (1970-1973) and the Grass Foundation (2001-2007). In 1980-84 he was Co-Director (with Dr. Thomas Reese) of the MBL's Neurobiology Course. From 1980 until 1997, he held an appointment as an Associate in Behavioral Biology in the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Dr. Hildebrand is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the German Academy of Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Letters and Science.

Joe L. Martinez, Jr., Ph.D. has been training students for over thirty years. In 1994 he received the American Association for the Advancement of Science Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement. The inscriptions on the award says, “For having guided the lives of literally thousands of students and hundreds of women and minorities to educational pursuits and careers in science as a teacher, advisor, role model, friend, and confidant.” A recent anonymous reviewer of one of his grants said, “Joe Martinez is one of the top mentors in the nation…Everything that Joe Martinez does is done extremely well and with passion. He is a national treasure.” For 20 years he has directed the American Psychological Association Diversity Program in Neuroscience funded by NIMH to support the training of doctoral and postdoctoral students.

To date over 218 predoctoral and 35 postdoctoral students have participated in SPINES and 117 of these earned their doctoral degree. In the summer he is the Co-Director (along with James Townsel) of the Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics, and Survival (SPINES) a course offered at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, supported by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and designed to enhance the success of doctoral and postdoctoral students underrepresented in science. He served for 15 years, as a full professor, in one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions, the University of California, Berkeley. Currently he holds the Ewing Halsell Distinguished Chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research is directed towards understanding how the brain stores memories. He investigates learning in animals, using behavioral, electrophysiological and molecular techniques. He is currently conducting experiments using DNA gene chip technology looking for “memory genes.” He has over 175 publications. Students at all levels (postdoctoral, doctoral, masters and undergraduates) work in his laboratory to discover more about the brain’s workings. His book edited with Ray Kesner the, “Neurobiology of Learning and Memory” is in its third edition and is popular with students. He is currently founder and Director of the Cajal Neuroscience Institute at the University of Texas San Antonio.

James Townsel, Ph.D. was introduced to the horseshoe crab, Limulis Polyphemus, as a potential research subject in 1963, as a graduate student in zoology/physiology at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. Since there was not a ready supply of horseshoe crabs in Indiana, he became a regular recipient of shipments of animals from the MBL. His first trip to the MBL occurred in the summer of 1971, when, as a charter member of an NIH funded initiative titled Frontiers in Research and Teaching Program (FRTP), he took the neurobiology course. In1972, he returned to the MBL as a FRTP research fellow.

After completing a two year postdoctoral fellowship with Ed Kravitz in the Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School in 1973, he accepted a faculty position at Meharry Medical College. In the summer of 1974, he returned to the MBL as the coordinator of the FRTP program. Among the FRTP recruits in that year was Joe Martinez. Funding for the FRTP ended in 1974. From 1974 until 1986, Townsel’s career trajectory included a six year span,1978-1984,where he served as an associate dean in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois and the last four years as an associate vice chancellor. In 1984 he returned to Meharry Medical College to chair the Department of Physiology. In 1986 he returned to the MBL where joined Joe Martinez in launching the forerunner of the Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics and Survival. He has returned each year since. His personal commitment to providing educational opportunities to underrepresented minorities is reflected in the fact that he trained eight African American Ph. D’s His longtime commitment to the SPINES program at the MBL has been consistent with his life-long commitment to increasing diversity in the biomedical workforce .