Another presidency for Tilghman

After stepping down as University president at the end of June, Shirley Tilghman won’t have to wait long before stepping into another presidential role, this time as president-elect of the American Society for Cell Biology. 

Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., the ASCB announced Tilghman’s election as its 2015 president-elect last Friday. She will assume the office in Jan. 2015, succeeding 2014 president-elect Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, a chief researcher at the National Institutes of Health. Each ASCB president serves a one-year term and is succeeded by the incumbent president-elect.

With over 10,000 members, the ACSB is an “inclusive, international community of biologists studying the cell,” according to its website. Its activities span both the scientific and public spheres, with events dedicated to questions of research policy as well as science education. 

Don Cleveland GS ’77, a professor of molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego and current ASCB president, said he was thrilled with Tilghman’s selection. 

“We think Shirley will be an ideal choice, in part because of her already public stature, gained not just from her earlier scientific career but from her service at Princeton,” Cleveland said. “She’ll be an almost ideal representative for science. The ASCB allows her that platform. My guess is that she’s going to maintain a very public presence in science, and this is one such way for her to do that.”

She was selected by an ACSB nominating committee, Cleveland explained. 

Tilghman is very familiar with search committees, having served on the one to replace University President Harold Shapiro before becoming a candidate herself. Prior to settling in at Nassau Hall in 2001, Tilghman was a professor of life sciences, a position she has held at Princeton since she began working at the University in 1986. In 1998, she also became the founding director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. The directorship is now held by molecular biology professor David Botstein, a current member of the ASCB’s council. 

Marisa S. Bartolomei, a professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, completed her postdoctoral studies in Tilghman’s lab in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She said Tilghman’s leadership capacity was evident even during her early years at the University. 

“She’s probably one of the smarter people I’ve met in science, so she can really take information, synthesize it and push it to the next level,” Bartolomei said. “I think her best trait is that she’s just really good at working with people. She’s a great listener, she’s great at saying things clearly and taking the high road — putting people together and getting things done.”

Cleveland sighted the same intelligence and social acumen in his praise of Tilghman. 

“I remember meeting her the first time at an NIH review panel. The review panel was headed by an individual who just won America’s highest prize in science. His right-hand person won a Nobel Prize later. It then became very clear to me that this women could hold her own with anyone on the planet,” Cleveland explained. 

“I know she has tremendous capacity, and even more now that she’s had even more experience in negotiating complex issues [as University president],” he added. 

In her lengthy scientific career, Tilghman has made seminal contributions to the emerging field of genomics. She served as a founding member of the NIH’s National Advisory Council of the Human Genome Project, which ultimately recommended that the effort to sequence the human genome move forward. 

Although the project would not be fully completed until 2003, Bartolomei said Tilghman became “convinced” that genomics was the “right thing to do."

Tilghman's lab was an early pioneer of genomic studies in mice. “Nowadays, if you have a mutation in a mouse, you think, ‘Oh, well I’ll sequence it.’ But we didn’t know the sequence then, and Shirley was involved in helping put together some of the resources that were important for making the mouse a more tractable system for identifying mutations,” Bartolomei explained.  

Today, mice are the most commonly used vertebrate animal in genetic science, and mouse models — in which mice are bred with particular genetic characteristics — are ubiquitous in labs across the globe. 

Tilghman’s lab was one of the first to identify a type of genetic sequence known as an “imprinted gene” in the mouse. A paper resulting from this work, which Bartolomei co-authored with Tilghman, was published in Nature in 1991 and has since garnered nearly 700 citations. 

But Cleveland said he believes one of Tilghman’s greatest strengths as a representative for the scientific community lies in her ability not only to facilitate exciting discoveries but also to effectively communicate science to the public. 

“One of the weaknesses many scientists have is that they haven’t established the tools to say things in clear terms that non-scientists can understand,” he explained. “Shirley had that skill before she became president of Princeton, and I’m sure that skill has only been amplified.”

In her distinguished career, Tilghman has won a variety of awards for her scientific contributions, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Developmental Biology in 2003, a Genetics Society of America medal in 2007 and the Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research in 2010. 

Before taking up the ACSB’s presidency, Tilghman will take a leave of absence from the University for the 2013-14 school year. She plans to resume teaching and research the following year. 

She will be replaced by University Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83, who will become the 20th President of the University on July 1.