2015 Curt Stern Award Introduction: Leonid Kruglyak

Abstract

I am pleased to introduce Leonid Kruglyak as this year’s winner of the Curt Stern Award. The Curt Stern Award honors the memory of an outstanding and pioneering human geneticist and is presented yearly for outstanding scientific achievements that occurred in human genetics during a 10 year period in a researcher’s career. Leonid began his career in science not as a geneticist, but rather as a physicist. He graduated with highest honors in physics from Princeton University in 1987. He then got his Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990 and studied theoretical physics at NATO. He followed that with a stint as a Whitehead fellow, when he finally saw the light and joined us in the world of genetics. Leonid has held faculty positions at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Princeton University, and the University of California, Los Angeles, where he remains today. He is also a Howard Hughes Investigator. Needless to say, Leonid has won an extraordinary number of award and honors that cover pages of his CV. But rather than talk about all that, I’d rather tell you about his science. Leonid’s Kruglyak’s original and creative work has ranged broadly over linkage genetics, population genetics, and genomics and has drawn on experimental, mathematical, and computational approaches. The results in each area have had an extremely wide impact. His 1995 paper describing statistical standards for genome-wide linkage studies has been cited over 3,700 times and is the gold standard for interpreting putative evidence of linkage. His 1996 paper describing the program GENEHUNTER has been cited over 2,300 times. This paper was particularly important because it gave us a way to analyze human pedigrees for disease loci when no model was apparent—thus becoming the standard for nonparametric genetic mapping across human and model-organism fields. His 1999 paper on the number of SNPs needed for genome-wide association studies originally proved very controversial, but it has now been proved many times over and has laid the foundation for the HapMap project. Finally, his 2002 paper reporting the first experiment on genetics of global gene expression, and the papers that grew out of that work, have provided key insights into the genetic basis of complex traits, regulatory sequence variation, gene regulation, and the evolution of expression differences. For these and so many more reasons, he is this year’s winner of the Curt Stern Award.