Pioneer in the Genetics of Biological Clocks to Chair New Genetics Department

HANOVER, NH �Dartmouth Medical School geneticist Jay Dunlap, Ph.D., whose groundbreaking studies have helped decode the clockwork that governs the daily ebb and flow of life activities, has been named inaugural chair of the medical school's new genetics department and professor of genetics.

The appointment, pending approval by the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees, was announced by Medical School Dean John C. Baldwin, M.D., who initiated the new genetics department in recognition of Dartmouth's necessary role in this burgeoning area of basic research, teaching and patient care.

Dunlap is internationally acclaimed for pioneering genetic research that has helped delineate the genetic basis for the timing of biological phenomena. His work has advanced understanding of what cues circadian rhythms, the 24-hour cycle that paces our daily activities, including when we go to sleep and when we wake up. The delay in resetting the clock is an underlying cause of jet lag, and clock malfunction has been linked to seasonal affective disorder and various sleep and mental disturbances.

Dunlap�s leadership and preeminence as a geneticist coupled with his contributions as a Dartmouth faculty member for the past 15 years make him the ideal leader for building this new medical school department, the vanguard for the next century in the life sciences at Dartmouth, according to Baldwin.

"Genetics is critical for the future of any institution interested in science and medicine. The intersection of information technology and genetics is the quintessence of science in the next quarter century. This new Dartmouth Medical School department will epitomize the inter-disciplinary work that this field requires and that Dartmouth as a community is so well organized to do," Baldwin said.

"Technologies in genetics have revolutionized our understanding of the basic mechanisms of biology. We now stand on the threshold of transforming medicine from palliation of disease to maintenance of wellness and actual cure, based upon understanding fundamental bases of wellness and disease. We are fortunate to have a geneticist with the stature, vision and respect that Jay Dunlap has in the field of genetics and in the Dartmouth community to guide such an important venture for Dartmouth."

"I'm both honored to be asked and humbled by the magnitude of this opportunity to create a new department; it's a challenge that few in academia will ever have," said Dunlap. "It will be great fun to work with colleagues here and elsewhere, to recruit the best faculty available, and to build a first-rate, university-wide basic science department centered within DMS and connecting the many facets of genetics within the College and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center."

Said Steven Reppert, M.D., a Harvard professor and circadian rhythms expert at the Massachusetts General Hospital, "Jay Dunlap is an outstanding geneticist. His research discoveries have been truly seminal, leading to a better understanding of how our biological clock works at the molecular level. He is eminently qualified to head a new genetics initiative at Dartmouth."

Using both classical and molecular genetics as tools for working in one of the best-known genetic model systems, Dunlap has pieced together gears to explain how biological clocks are assembled and set. He and colleague Jennifer Loros, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry, who is his spouse, were the first to isolate and clone genes required for timekeeping and to demonstrate how light resets the internal clockwork that drives diverse functions of plants and animals. More recently, they showed that temperature is another key trigger.

Dunlap's investigations of the genes that time when the bread mold, Neurospora, sends out spores have led him and his colleagues into work on mice and offer insight for humans. "Watershed studies on the Neurospora clock genes have predicted and presaged subsequent work in mammals by several years," Dunlap noted. "In general terms, what is true for the Neurospora clock has been true in mice and will probably be true in people."

In 1991 Dunlap received the Honma International Prize awarded for the most "exceptional contributions in the field of circadian rhythms" by an investigator of any nationality under age 40, and in 1998 he received a prestigious MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that extends research funding to exceptional scientists for up to 10 years.

Dunlap earned his B.S. degree in chemistry and in oceanography from the University of Washington, and his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard. Following post-doctoral work in molecular genetics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he joined the biochemistry faculty at Dartmouth in 1984.

Hali Wickner

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