Jackson Laboratory Professor Ken Paigen receives Fulbright Senior Specialists Award
| Date: October 7, 2008 | 
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Kenneth Paigen, Ph.D., professor and executive research fellow at The Jackson Laboratory, has been selected for a Fulbright Senior Specialists project in France at Pasteur Institute during November 2008, according to the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Dr. Paigen is one of over 400 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad this year through the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program. The Fulbright Senior Specialists Program, created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, provides short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) to prominent U.S. faculty and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at post secondary, academic institutions around the world.
The Fulbright award to Dr. Paigen will enable him to work with colleagues at the Institut Pasteur in Paris along with other European scientists, to exchange information, ideas and experiments to advance understanding of a fundamental aspect of human life and reproduction: how genetic diversity occurs.
"In the course of making sperm and eggs," Dr. Paigen explains, "our chromosomes engage in an intricate dance in which they exchange parts. That is what ensures new genetic diverstity at every generation; it is what makes every one of us a totally unique individual. Any failure to carry out this exchange, what geneticists call recombination, causes sterility. There is much that we know about the underlying processes of recombination, and even more that we don’t.
Dr. Paigen will be traveling with his wife, Jackson Professor Beverly Paigen, who will be interacting with other European scientists studying the underlying causes of heart disease.
The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement.
Among thousands of prominent Fulbright Scholar alumni are Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel Corporation. Distinguished Fulbright Senior Specialist participants include Mahmoud Ayoub, Professor of Religion at Temple University, Heidi Hartmann, President and CEO, Institute for Women's Policy Research, Percy R. Luney, Jr. Dean and Professor, College of Law, Florida A&M University and Emily Vargas-Barone, Founder and Executive Director of the RISE Institute.
The Jackson Laboratory is a nonprofit biomedical research institution and National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center based in Bar Harbor, Maine. Its mission is to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community.
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A digital photo of Dr. Paigen is available on request.
Contact(s): Joyce Peterson, 207-288-6058
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