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Gerald R. Fink Elected to the MBL Board of Trustees
Gerald R. Fink was elected to the MBL Board of Trustees at the November 3, 2007 meeting. He joins the class of 2011.
Dr. Fink is a founding Member of the Whitehead Institute and is the
American Cancer Society Professor of Genetics at MIT. He served as Director of the Whitehead Institute from 1990 to 2001. Dr. Fink received his Ph.D. in genetics from Yale University, conducted postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health and served for 15 years on the faculty of Cornell University. He is a past President of the Genetics Society of America, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Member of the Institute of Medicine.
Dr. Fink developed baker's yeast as a model for studying the fundamental biology of all organisms. Topping the list of Dr. Fink's seminal contributions to the field was his development of a technique for "transforming" yeast that allowed researchers to introduce a foreign piece of DNA into yeast cells and study the inheritance and expression of that DNA. This technique laid the groundwork for the commercial use of yeast as biological factories for manufacturing vaccines and other drugs and set the stage for similar manipulations in more complex organisms.
Dr. Fink is on the Scientific Advisory Board of Dyadic International, Inc. and GlycoFi, which was acquired by Merck in 2006. He taught in the MBL Molecular Mycology course in 1997 and 1998.
