Profile of Harris A. Lewin

Abstract

Immunogeneticist Harris A. Lewin has balanced years of research with work as an administrator, including the past five years as the vice chancellor of research at the University of California, Davis. In 2016, Lewin will expand on his newest passion in the Department of Evolution and Ecology and the University of California, Davis Genome Center: genome evolution. Lewin’s work aims to reconstruct how the chromosomes of the earliest mammalian ancestors evolved into the chromosomes found in mammals that exist today. The publication of his Inaugural Article (1) is a culmination of a line of research that set out to explain why the cloning of mammals is so inefficient and unpredictable. The answer lies in the links between the cloned embryo and the endometrial lining of the mother’s uterus, says Lewin, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Harris A. Lewin. Photograph by Karin Higgins and image courtesy of University of California, Davis. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957, Lewin’s career path was influenced by his family. He developed a passion for invention and investigation from his paternal grandfather, an inventor, jeweler, and tinkerer who, despite a lack of formal education, was a Captain of Industry during World War II. However, Lewin’s father was a naturalist at heart. He and his mother often took Lewin and his older sister to the American Museum of Natural History and to upstate New York every summer to spend time in nature. By the time Lewin graduated from high school, his sister had emigrated to Israel, where she lived on a Kibbutz. He visited her for the summer before starting a two-year degree at the State University of New York at Delhi, and again before transferring to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to finish his bachelor’s degree. “Before I went to Israel …