Professor Jeff Gelles (BCHM), the Aron and Imre Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences earlier this month. Gelles is part of the 239th class of elected members, which include former First Lady Michelle Obama.
“I’m very grateful to the colleagues who nominated and voted me in,” Gelles wrote in an email to The Brandeis Hoot.
Gelles’ lab at Brandeis, nicknamed “The Little Engine Shop,” focuses on the “molecular machines” that his lab studies, according to an email Gelles sent to The Hoot. These machines are “assemblies of proteins that carry out essential processes in living cells,” he said. The lab uses various forms of light microscopy that have the ability to record individual molecules as they perform their various functions.
He was inspired to name his lab “The Little Engine Shop,” because some of the molecular machines that his lab studies are really engines. “They can use the energy from a chemical reaction to do useful mechanical work, just like an internal combustion engine,” he said. Some of the machines are a few billionths of a meter in diameter, he included.
The name of the lab came from the Volkswagen mechanic’s shop that he used to go to in Pasadena, CA when he was in grad school. “The first car I ever owned was a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle, which like all Volksies of that era had a very small engine,” he wrote to The Hoot.
Gelles has been at Brandeis for almost 30 years, having been hired after completing his postdoctoral work at Brandeis. He thinks the greatest accomplishment of his lab has been the students that he has been able to train to do scientific research.
“Quite a few of them have gone on to do research of their own in industry, academia and government,” he wrote. “I think science is important and I’m proud that Brandeis provides some students the opportunity to get this kind of intensive research experience.”
The Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Academy, Nancy C. Andrews, said in a press release that “while the work of this class includes areas never imagined in 1780 — such as cultural studies, cybersecurity, disease ecology, nanotechnology, paleoclimatology, and superconductivity — the members of the class of 2019 embody the founders’ vision of cultivating knowledge that advances, in their words, a ‘free, virtuous, and independent people.’”
The 2019 Richman Fellow Anna Deveare Smith and artist Mark Bradford, a member of the Rose Art Museum’s board advisors, are also part of the new class of inductees with Gelles, according to an article by BrandeisNOW. He will join 15 other Brandeis faculty members who are already part of the Academy, including University Professor Jonathan Sarna (NEJS), Gina Turrigiano (NBIO) and James Haber (BIOL).
According to the press release, Gelles, along with the other electees, will be inducted into the Academy in October at a ceremony in Cambridge, MA.
