As announced earlier this year, GSA’s Board of Directors launched an audit to review the five major awards conferred by the Society: the Edward Novitski Prize, the Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education, the Genetics Society of America Medal, the George W. Beadle Award, and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal.

The central goal of the audit was answering a key question: Do our current awards exemplify the GSA community’s core values? To answer this question, the audit assessed three essential components of the awards program: 1) the nomination process, 2) the review process, and 3) the eligibility and criteria used to confer each of the five awards. The Awards Audit Task Force discussed these components, looking for sources of bias, unintended barriers, and ways to diversify the nominees—and thus the award winners. The Task Force also met with focus groups to bring in a wider variety of opinions and points of view.

Based on the audit, the Task Force proposes the following changes to the GSA Awards process:

Nomination Process

Previously, two letters of support were required: an initial nomination letter, including a description of the nominee’s merit for the particular award and a letter of support from a secondary nominator. The letter of support could be co-signed by as many individuals as were willing. Nominees were then approached to provide an up-to-date CV. 

The audit identified a number of potential barriers and sources of bias within the existing nomination process. We have revamped the process in the following ways:

First, the Task Force recommends moving to a single nomination letter with a supporting questionnaire specific to the particular award. This questionnaire will help standardize the information collected on each nominee; nominees will help their nominators complete the questionnaire. The nominee will be contacted to provide an NIH-style biosketch (no more than five pages) and a brief lived experience statement. This statement allows nominees to volunteer information about their career paths, including potential barriers that they have faced and/or overcome, without requiring disclosure; it also lets nominees present their research/mentoring/teaching/DEI philosophies for consideration in addition to their biosketch. We invite self-nominations; self-nominators should reach out to a colleague to co-sign their nomination.

Second, GSA will create a GSA Awards Nomination Committee comprising members from the community representing the richness and diversity of the society. This subcommittee will proactively invite nominations from various departments, schools, model organism boards, and other relevant groups. The goal is to broaden the pool of nominees from a wide variety of backgrounds. 

Finally, as part of GSA’s efforts to improve equity and inclusion, we will collect nominee demographic data on a volunteer basis to help us gauge our progress. We strongly encourage nominees to answer demographic questions; their answers will not affect the committee’s decision-making process and will be kept confidential.

After five years, this new nomination process will be reviewed by the Board to assess the degree of success.

Review Process

The GSA Awards Committee oversees the review process. Members of the Awards Committee are appointed to a three-year term by the GSA President and Board of Directors. The committee reviews all nomination materials and identifies three candidates for each award. The three candidates from each award are submitted to the Board of Directors for consideration, and the Board votes to select the awardee.

The audit found that the review process did not need significant changes. 

Award Descriptions and Criteria

The audit revealed a measure of confusion about the potential overlap in criteria for some awards. Specifically, the Task Force noted that the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal and the Genetics Society of America Medal were often both used as lifetime achievement awards. The Beadle Award and Novitski Prize were both used to recognize contributions via community-resource/reagent creation. Additionally, the lack of recognition for early- and mid-career scientists was obvious. 

To best address these deficits, the criteria for each award will be refined as follows to best reflect GSA’s ethos and the goal of each award. Notably, the GSA Medal will now be explicitly defined as a mid-career award, and a new Early Career Medal will be added to the slate.

• The Morgan Medal will remain a lifetime recognition of an individual based on their contributions to the field of genetics, which include mentoring, community service and research portfolio.
• The GSA Medal will now be awarded at mid-career to an individual with seven to 15 years of experience in their independent research career at the time of nomination. The awardee will be recognized for their research excellence, mentoring, community engagement, and other related activities.
• A new GSA Early Career Medal will be awarded to an early-career individual within the first seven years of their independent research career at the time of nomination. The awardee will be recognized for their research excellence, mentoring, community engagement, and other related activities.
• The Novitski Prize will recognize creativity at all career stages, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. The nomination must clearly state the creative effort being recognized, and up to two individuals may jointly receive the prize.
• The Jones Award will continue to recognize the contribution to education from K-12 onwards. Individuals and teams can be nominated.
• The Beadle Award recognizes an individual’s service to the community. Beadle nominees should have clear and demonstrable community engagement, service, and leadership beyond research endeavors. GSA will particularly invite nominations of individuals who have worked to make the community more inclusive and diverse. Individuals and teams can be nominated.

Timeline

To give us time to enact these changes and ensure process updates, the Task Force recommended extending the awards cycle timeline. The Board of Directors discussed this recommendation and agreed that GSA will not announce any awards for 2022. Instead, applications will be solicited early in 2023 to be awarded in summer of the same year.

Becoming the president of a world-class university isn’t something that typically happens “by accident,” but that’s exactly how Shirley Tilghman describes it. “I did not intend to be a university president,” Tilghman says. “I probably had the steepest learning curve of any university president ever.”

In 2000, Tilghman was serving as founding director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. When Princeton’s then-president, Harold Shapiro, announced his departure, Tilghman joined the search committee to ensure that the next president would support the new genomics initiative. “I was going to protect my turf,” she says.

“I was on that committee for about six months. At one point, I left the committee early to teach, and when I came to the next meeting, the chair said, ‘The committee would like you to step down and to become a candidate.’ I thought they were out of their minds,” she recalls. “I think I said to them, ‘I can’t leave you people alone for a minute!’”

Still, Tilghman gave the idea careful consideration. “I decided I had probably done the best science I was going to do by that point,” she recalls. Considering a possible next chapter, she began to get excited about “the opportunity to make an institution that [she] adored—Princeton—better.” In June 2001, she was sworn in as Princeton’s first female president.

Tilghman’s body of research had, indeed, already secured her place in genetics textbooks. In addition, she served as a key advisor to the Human Genome Project, helping to steer the initiative through the capricious winds of government funding and forever transforming the field of genetics. For her outstanding contributions, Tilghman has been awarded the 2022 George W. Beadle Award from the Genetics Society of America, which recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers beyond an exemplary research career.

Genomic imprinting

As a postdoc, Tilghman helped develop a method of cloning mammalian genes. She went on to characterize the mouse beta-globin gene, uncovering a great deal about gene structure and “intervening sequences,” now called introns, that interrupt coding regions. As a faculty member at Princeton in the early 1990s, Tilghman and members of her lab studied a gene called H19, which was very highly expressed in the mouse embryo. The first odd thing they discovered was that the gene contained no open reading frame, indicating it could not encode a protein. “There was no other long noncoding RNA at the time, this was the first,” Tilghman recalls. “At that point, I was given very good advice from many colleagues who said [to] drop it like a hot potato.”

However, tantalized by the high expression levels in the embryo, Tilghman couldn’t let H19 go. Work by Marisa Bartolomei, a postdoc in the lab at the time, showed that H19 was only expressed from the maternal chromosome. “That’s when the floodgates opened,” Tilghman recalls.

H19 was located next to another imprinted gene, IGF2, which was only expressed from the paternal chromosome. This pair of genes provided the first evidence of imprinted gene clusters. Tilghman’s lab produced a number of papers characterizing the promoters and enhancers that lay between the two genes and describing the molecular mechanisms involved in imprinting, including chromatin organization and methylation as a key regulator of expression. Bartolomei, who now heads her own lab at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, recalls that era of rapid discovery. “It was insanely exciting,” she says. “Shirley is definitely one of the more creative people who worked in the imprinting field.”

Human Genome Project and beyond

As one of the founding members of the National Advisory Council of the Human Genome Project, Tilghman helped define the public effort in sequencing the human genome. She advocated for sequencing the genomes of various model organisms in addition to the human genome, a move that conferred two key advantages. First, it allowed for small, incremental victories to maintain high enthusiasm for the project and keep funding flowing over the long timeframe required. Second, it expanded interest in the project and the perception of benefit to a wider range of scientists beyond just the handful studying human genetics. “A genome enthusiast,” she once said, “is a genome critic who just got a hit in their organism’s sequence database.”

Tilghman was influential in setting a precedent for data accessibility, starting with the mouse genome, says Tamara Caspary of Emory University, who was a graduate student in Tilghman’s lab. “It was really important to her that those data be publicly available,” Caspary says. “She very clearly highlighted that it needed to be community-driven, in terms of selecting what strains to be sequenced.” By actively involving the genetics community, Tilghman helped sustain a wide enthusiasm for the genome sequencing efforts that carried the project to its ultimate successes. Similarly, as a trustee of the Jackson Laboratory, she strongly supported establishing the Mouse Genome Informatics database. “It’s tremendous,” Caspary says. “The well just gets deeper with the data you can mine out of that website. She made that data accessible worldwide.”

Tilghman has been equally influential on the personal side of science, advocating for reform in the biomedical research pipeline. As ever-increasing numbers of trainees vie for limited resources, it becomes harder for science students and postdocs to envision a viable path to a research career. Tilghman has worked to address what she sees as systemic flaws in the process, including perverse incentives in research funding, problems with the peer review system and obstacles to new investigators obtaining federal grants.

Through all these accomplishments, Tilghman has served as an important role model for a generation of women in science. “She was incredibly fearless in going from one thing to another,” Bartolomei says. “She led by example. The key is that not only is she smart, she’s creative, she gives great talks—she’s the complete package. She taught me how to be a woman in science.”

The George W. Beadle Award honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers. GSA established the award in 1999 in honor of an outstanding scientist and a respected academic, administrator, and public servant—George W. Beadle (1903-1989).