Endocrine Society members Holly Ingraham, MD, Daniel Drucker, MD, and Laurinda A. Jaffe, PhD, have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which recognizes achievement in science and provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.
This year, NAS elected 120 members — 59 of whom are women, the most elected in a single year — and 30 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. “The historic number of women elected this year reflects the critical contributions that they are making in many fields of science, as well as a concerted effort by our Academy to recognize those contributions and the essential value of increasing diversity in our ranks,” according to NAS president Marcia McNutt. “I am pleased to welcome all of our new members, and I look forward to engaging with them in the work of the National Academies.”
Ingraham is the Hertzstein Distinguished Investigator, professor, and associate vice chairman, Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California — San Francisco, Calif., and studies hormone-responsive nodes in the brain and is particularly interested in estrogen’s signaling in the brain and how this impacts female metabolism. She has studied the influence of estrogen-sensitive brain cells on bone density and is interested in the development of the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus, the neuroendocrine center of the brain. Beyond the brain, Ingraham has studied sex-specific differences in gut-brain signaling pathways, in an effort to understand why women are more susceptible to intestinal visceral pain syndromes.
Jaffe, professor and chair in the Department of Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, studies the physiological mechanisms that regulate oocyte cell and fertilization. She is interested in the meiosis process that takes place in mammalian ovarian follicles. She identified the proteins (Gs protein) and receptors (GPR3) that are responsible for meiotic prophase arrests and has studied the processes that give rise to the fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-induced inhibition of bone growth.
Drucker, editor-in-chief of Endocrine Reviews, is currently a professor of medicine at the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute of Mt. Sinai Hospital and the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. Drucker’s laboratory studies the molecular biology and physiology of gut hormones, with a focus on the glucagon-like peptides. Drucker’s scientific studies have identified multiple novel mechanisms of hormone action, enabling the development of new drug classes for diabetes, obesity, and intestinal failure.
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