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Tom Payne, vice chancellor
for agriculture and dean of the College of Agriculture,
Food and Natural Resources, congratulates Linda Randall.
Randall was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences for making extraordinary contributions to the biochemical
sciences field. Jim Curley photo
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Professor
Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
By Forrest Rose
Linda Randall, Wurdack
Chair in Biochemical Sciences at the University of Missouri,
has been elected Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Academy made the announcement
April 30.
She becomes only the second MU faculty member
ever elected to the Academy and the first from the MU College
of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.
“It is truly an honor and privilege
for our College to have the good fortune to number Lin among our
faculty,” said Tom Payne, vice chancellor for agriculture
and dean of the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.
“Her research accomplishments make her well-deserving of
the honor, as she truly is a world-renowned leader in the field
of molecular biochemistry.”
“I’m certainly greatly honored,” Randall
said,
“but I heard about it in the weirdest way. My husband is
traveling, and someone sent him an e-mail about it. He called
me and asked: ‘Why are people congratulating you? Did
you get elected to something?’”
Randall’s
research centers on the role of proteins made inside cells that
act in concert with “molecular chaperones” to
cross the cellular membrane barrier to their sites of action.
“Research in my laboratory currently
focuses on studies of molecular chaperones dedicated to the process
of protein export in E. coli,” she said. “This interest
in chaperone function arose from my laboratory’s previous
investigations of protein export.”
Randall and her husband,
Gerald Hazelbauer, direct the Membrane Group at MU. Both study
phenomena related to biological membranes. The two met and married
when they were graduate students at the University of Wisconsin,
then accepted postdoctoral appointments in Paris and joined the
faculty at University of Uppsala, Sweden.
They next moved to
Washington State University, bringing with them a European custom
they enjoy to this day: twice daily teatimes for members of the
Membrane Group to discuss their work or simply to socialize.
The two moved “very happily” to
Missouri in October 2000. “We just love it here,”
Randall said.
“I
am honored to welcome these outstanding and influential individuals
to the nation’s oldest and most illustrious
learned society,” said Academy President Patricia Meyer
Spacks in a news release. “These new members have made
extraordinary contributions to their fields and disciplines through
their commitment to the advancement of scholarly and creative
work in every field and profession.”
Randall, already a
member of the National
Academy of Sciences, said her fellowship in the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences holds special meaning because “it’s
given out to people like writers, composers and artists, not
just scientists. That’s one of the things I really like
about it.” MU’s other Academy member is
journalism professor Geneva Overholser, who was elected in
2001.
Randall examined the contents of a newly arrived
package from the academy – her first official notification
of the honor. “It says it’s a highly competitive process,”
she said. “It doesn’t tell me how I got in.”
Scanning the list of notable academy fellows, she gasped in mock
horror: “Alexander Graham Bell? Albert Einstein? I’m
starting to feel unworthy!”
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin,
John Hancock, and other scholar-patriots, the academy’s
purpose was “to cultivate every art and science which may
tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of
a free, independent, and virtuous people.” The unique structure
of the American Academy allows the academy to conduct interdisciplinary
studies on international security, social policy, education, and
the humanities that draw on the range of academic and intellectual
disciplines of its members. The current membership of more than
4,500 includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize
winners.
She and other new academy members will be
inducted at a ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 9. “I
hope I can go,”
she said. “I’m still wondering who nominated me.
You’d
think they would have called me. It’s kind of a
mystery.”
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November 15, 2007
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