Sean Carroll - F1000 Former Member (18 July 2001 to 02 December 2011)
Department Genetics and Molecular Biology, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Graduate School, Madison, WI, USA
BIOGRAPHY
ACADEMIC POSITIONS:Sean Carroll is Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin.
EDUCATION:
Dr Carroll earned his BA in Biology at Washington University in St Louis, his PhD in Immunology at Tufts Medical School, and carried out his postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He has also received an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Minnesota.
PUBLICATIONS:
He is the author of the new book Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (2009), which was finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for non-fiction, The Making of the Fittest (2006), which won the Phi Beta Kappa 2007 Science Book Award, and Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo (2005), which was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Science and Technology). His first two books were the basis for, and Dr Carroll was the scientific consulting producer of, a new two-hour NOVA special that was broadcast in December 2009 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.
MEMBERSHIPS AND AWARDS:
Dr Carroll is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Distinguished Service Award of the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the Viktor Hamburger Outstanding Educator Award from the Society for Developmental Biology.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Our research is directed towards gaining a comprehensive picture of the genetic control of body pattern in fruit flies, butterflies, and other animals. By combining genetic and embryological approaches with molecular techniques for analyzing the structure and expression of key genes that control the fate of groups of cells, we are elucidating the developmental regulatory mechanisms that guide the formation of embryos and body parts. The genes controlling the basic body pattern are fundamental to understanding the origin of the different body structures found in Arthopods and other segmented animals. Using our knowledge of Drosophila, we are studying the developmental and genetic basis of body pattern evolution.