Awards and honors
Hanawalt won the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Northern California chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1991, and the Peter and Helen Bing Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. He has won annual research awards from the American Society for Photobiology and the Environmental Mutagen Society (EMS) in 1992, from which he also received the annual Student Mentoring Award. [1]
He won the International Mutation Research Award for Excellence in Scientific Achievement in 1987, and the Princess Takamatsu Cancer Foundation Annual Lectureship in Japan in 1999 and he was more recently a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University.
He has served as president of the EMS and was the president/organizer of the 9th International Conference on Environmental Mutagens (ICEM) in San Francisco in 2005. In 2009 he delivered the Keynote Lecture for the 10th ICEM in Florence, Italy. He has organized many meetings on DNA repair, including the first international conference in this field, at Squaw Valley, CA, in 1974, and subsequent Gordon Conferences on Mutagenesis and on Mammalian DNA Repair.
Mutagenesis is a process by which the genetic information of an organism is changed by the production of a mutation. It may occur spontaneously in nature, or as a result of exposure to mutagens. It can also be achieved experimentally using laboratory procedures. A mutagen is a mutation-causing agent, be it chemical or physical, which results in an increased rate of mutations in an organism's genetic code. In nature mutagenesis can lead to cancer and various heritable diseases, and it is also a driving force of evolution. Mutagenesis as a science was developed based on work done by Hermann Muller, Charlotte Auerbach and J. M. Robson in the first half of the 20th century.
In genetics, a mutagen is a physical or chemical agent that permanently changes genetic material, usually DNA, in an organism and thus increases the frequency of mutations above the natural background level. As many mutations can cause cancer in animals, such mutagens can therefore be carcinogens, although not all necessarily are. All mutagens have characteristic mutational signatures with some chemicals becoming mutagenic through cellular processes.
Nucleotide excision repair is a DNA repair mechanism. DNA damage occurs constantly because of chemicals, radiation and other mutagens. Three excision repair pathways exist to repair single stranded DNA damage: Nucleotide excision repair (NER), base excision repair (BER), and DNA mismatch repair (MMR). While the BER pathway can recognize specific non-bulky lesions in DNA, it can correct only damaged bases that are removed by specific glycosylases. Similarly, the MMR pathway only targets mismatched Watson-Crick base pairs.
Gilbert Chu is an American biochemist. He is a Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Biochemistry at the Stanford Medical School.
Miroslav Radman is a Croatian biologist.
Richard D. Wood is an American molecular biologist specializing in research on DNA repair and mutation. He is known for pioneering studies on nucleotide excision repair (NER), particularly for reconstituting the minimum set of proteins involved in this process, identifying proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) as part of the NER complex and identifying mammalian repair polymerases.
Transcription factor II Human is an important protein complex, having roles in transcription of various protein-coding genes and DNA nucleotide excision repair (NER) pathways. TFIIH first came to light in 1989 when general transcription factor-δ or basic transcription factor 2 was characterized as an indispensable transcription factor in vitro. This factor was also isolated from yeast and finally named as TFIIH in 1992.
William Brian Arthur is an economist credited with developing the modern approach to increasing returns. He has lived and worked in Northern California for many years. He is an authority on economics in relation to complexity theory, technology and financial markets. He has been on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Visiting Researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab at PARC. He is credited with the invention of the El Farol Bar problem.
UV excision repair protein RAD23 homolog B is a protein that in humans is encoded by the RAD23B gene.
Graham Charles Walker is an American biologist, notable for his work explicating the structure and function of proteins involved in DNA repair and mutagenesis, with applications for cancer, and for understanding rhizobium (bacterial) functions that infect plants and mammals.
Leon Ong Chua is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is a professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1971. He has contributed to nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural network theory.
Lennart Ljung is a Swedish professor in the Chair of Control Theory at Linköping University since 1976. He is known for his pioneering research in system identification, and is regarded as a leading researcher in control theory.
Lui Che Woo, GBM, MBE, JP (Chinese: 呂志和; Sidney Lau: Lui5 Ji3 Woh6) (born 9 August 1929, Jiangmen, China) is a Hong Kong business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is a member of the standing committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Jiangmen, People's Republic of China, and is a Hong Kong gambling magnate, founder and chairman of listed firms Galaxy Entertainment Group and K. Wah International Holdings Ltd. As of June 2021, he had an estimated net worth of US$19.0 billion and ranked the fourth richest man in Hong Kong according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Stephen Craig West FRS is a British biochemist and molecular biologist specialising in research on DNA recombination and repair. He is known for pioneering studies on genome instability diseases including cancer. West obtained his BSc in 1974, and his PhD in 1977, both from Newcastle University. He is currently a Principal Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He is an honorary Professor at University College London, and at Imperial College London. In recognition of his work he was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2007, is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the 2022 Royal Medal for 'discovering and determining the functions of key enzymes that are essential for DNA recombination, repair and the maintenance of genomes'.
Bruce William Stillman, AO, FAA, FRS is a biochemist and cancer researcher who has served as the Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) since 1994 and President since 2003. He also served as the Director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center for 25 years from 1992 to 2016. During his leadership, CSHL has been ranked as the No. 1 institution in molecular biology and genetics research by Thomson Reuters. Stillman's research focuses on how chromosomes are duplicated in human cells and in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae; the mechanisms that ensure accurate inheritance of genetic material from one generation to the next; and how missteps in this process lead to cancer. For his accomplishments, Stillman has received numerous awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize in 2004 and the 2010 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, both of which he shared with Thomas J. Kelly of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, as well as the 2019 Canada Gairdner International Award for biomedical research, which he shared with John Diffley.
Leona D. Samson is the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor and American Cancer Society Research Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the Director of the Center for Environmental Health Sciences from 2001 to 2012. Before her professorship at MIT, she held a professorship at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is on the editorial board of the journal DNA Repair. Her research interests focus on "methods for measuring DNA repair capacity (DRC) in human cells", research the National Institute of Health recognized as pioneering in her field, for which the NIH granted her the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award.
Antimutagens are the agents that interfere with the mutagenicity of a substance. The interference can be in the form of prevention of the transformation of a promutagenic compound into actual active mutagen, inactivation, or otherwise the prevention of Mutagen-DNA reaction.
Stephen Philip Jackson, FRS, FMedSci, is the Frederick James Quick Professor of Biology. He is a Senior Group Leader and Head of Cancer Research UK Laboratories at the Gurdon Institute.
Mutational signatures are characteristic combinations of mutation types arising from specific mutagenesis processes such as DNA replication infidelity, exogenous and endogenous genotoxin exposures, defective DNA repair pathways, and DNA enzymatic editing.
Orlando David Schärer is a chemist and biologist researching DNA repair, genomic integrity, and cancer biology. Schärer has taught biology, chemistry and pharmacology at various university levels on three continents. He is a distinguished professor at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and the associate director of the IBS Center for Genomic Integrity located in Ulsan, South Korea. He leads the three interdisciplinary research teams in the Chemical & Cancer Biology Branch of the center and specifically heads the Cancer Therapeutics Mechanisms Section.
