Soni Lacefield, PhD, a professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, has been named a 2025 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—the world’s largest general scientific society and the publisher of the journal Science.
Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers and recognizes their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.
In the following Q & A, Lacefield, one of four Dartmouth faculty being named an AAAS Fellow this year, shares her thoughts on receiving the honor and describes the focus of her research and impact she hopes it will have in helping to advance treatments for patients.
Q: What does it mean to you to be elected as an AAAS Fellow?
Lacefield: I’m grateful for the honor and for the recognition of the impact of my research on the broader scientific community. This distinction is not just a personal achievement but a testament to the collective efforts of my trainees, whose dedication have been instrumental to advancing our research.
Q: What has been the primary focus of your research?
Lacefield: I study meiosis, the specialized cell division that creates eggs and sperm. My research focused on two key questions: how cells properly distribute their chromosomes and how they remain committed to completing meiosis. These processes are essential for fertility and preventing genetic disorders and germ cell cancers.
When meiosis goes wrong, it can lead to infertility, miscarriages, germ cell tumors, or trisomy conditions like Down syndrome. By revealing the molecular mechanisms that regulate chromosome segregation and meiotic commitment, my work helps to reveal fundamental principles of cell division.
Q: Since moving your lab to Dartmouth (from Indiana University) two years ago, you’ve started focusing more on questions related to reproduction in women—how so?
Lacefield: We are currently investigating how genetic mutations that cause infertility disrupt specific events in meiosis, resulting in eggs that are not competent to produce viable embryos after fertilization.
To better understand these disruptions, we study mice with corresponding mutations, allowing us to isolate living oocytes (cells within the ovary) and use advanced microscopy to observe chromosome segregation in real time.
By directly monitoring meiosis as it happens, we aim to uncover the precise defects caused by these mutations and identify new strategies for mitigating infertility.
Q: Overall, what do you consider to be your most notable contribution to date?
Lacefield: We’ve done a lot of work trying to find the genes that help to maintain the cells in meiosis so that they end up forming a viable gamete (germ cell) in the end. I think our major contribution has been in being able to pinpoint those different genes and then in trying to identify how they’re functioning at the molecular level.
Some are within the cell cycle to make sure that it is regulated properly, and some are things we weren’t expecting at all, such as RNA-binding proteins that maintain the timing of when proteins get made in the cell.
Q: What do you enjoy most about your field and working in the Dartmouth environment?
Lacefield: In my field, it’s been nice to have people who have been willing to share techniques and technologies along the way. And Dartmouth has provided an incredibly supportive and friendly environment for me and my lab members since we moved here two years ago.
It’s really made a difference in being able to dream about the things that we want to accomplish and to have the support and resources available to be able to do those things. In addition to the grants my lab has received from NIH and NSF, I’m grateful for the support we’ve received locally through bioMT, the Cancer Center, the Genomics Shared Resource, and Dartmouth mouse modeling.
Q: How did you end up in your field of study?
Lacefield: I got really lucky as an undergraduate at UC Davis when I took when I took a genetics course for non-majors. The enthusiasm that the professor, Scott Hawley, had for science, genetics, and his research was infectious.
I did well in his course, and he wrote me a personal letter that I still have telling me what a wonderful job I did. That gave me the courage to ask him if I could work in his lab, which I ended up doing for three years. That laid the groundwork for my career—I ended up working in the same field that he worked in.
Sadly, he passed away a couple of weeks ago. I wouldn’t be here without his mentorship. It’s always been a goal of mine to be as good a mentor to my students as he was to me.
