The University of Wisconsin–Madison Laboratory of Genetics is proud to announce that Dr. Chris Todd Hittinger has received the James F. Crow Professorship Award for a five-year duration! The Crow Professorship Award provides support for an endowed professorship to advance and support the faculty member appointed to this professorship. The Fund was established in honor of Professor Crow who taught in the genetics department from 1948 to 1986 and who also served as chair of the Laboratory of Genetics and as acting dean of the School of Medicine and Public Health.
Chris is a Vilas Faculty Mid-Career Investigator, H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellow, Alfred Toepfer Faculty Fellow, and Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He recently served as the Director of the J. F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution, which coordinates the diverse Wisconsin Evolution community as across-college institute whose mission is to foster multidisciplinary research to address complex biological problems facing society, as well as working to improve public understanding of evolution through education and outreach. Chris earned a BS in Chemistry and Biology from Southeast Missouri State University in 2001 and a PhD in Genetics from UW-Madison in 2007. Prior to joining the faculty at UW-Madison, he was the Maclyn McCarty Postdoctoral Fellow of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, mentored by Mark Johnston at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
The Hittinger Lab uses the carbon metabolism of diverse yeasts as a model for fundamental and basic bioenergy, biomedical, and evolutionary research. The laboratory’s research interests and integrated approaches are at the intersection of biodiversity, biochemistry, biotechnology, metabolic engineering, and computational, functional, ecological, and evolutionary genomics with applications bioenergy and brewing. Dr. Hittinger serves as the Specialty Biofuels Team Lead of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center.
Francisco Pelegri, the previous Chair for the Department of Genetics, shares, “Dr. Hittinger is also a driving force behind large collaborative initiatives, most notably the Y1000+ Project, an ambitious international effort to sequence and analyze the genomes of all known budding yeast species. This project is generating an unprecedented genotype–phenotype map spanning over 400 million years of evolution, enabling new insights into the origins of metabolic diversity and the evolutionary mechanisms shaping eukaryotic genomes. Complementing this work, his leadership in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center has advanced the engineering of yeast strains for sustainable production of biofuels and bioproducts.”
Congratulations, again, to Dr. Hittinger for this outstanding accomplishment!