Elliot Meyerowitz facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Elliot Meyerowitz
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| Born | May 22, 1951 |
| Alma mater | Columbia University (A.B., 1973) Yale University (Ph.D., 1977) |
| Awards | Genetics Society of America Medal (1996) Mendel Medal (1997) International Prize for Biology (1997) Richard Lounsbery Award (1999) Wilbur Cross Medal (2001) Harrison Prize (2005) Balzan Prize (2006) Wolf Prize in Agriculture (2024) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Biology |
| Institutions | California Institute of Technology |
| Notable students | Xuemei Chen, Henrik Jönsson, Detlef Weigel |
Elliot Meyerowitz (born May 22, 1951) is an American biologist. He is famous for his important work on how plants grow and develop.
Contents
A Scientist's Journey
Elliot Meyerowitz started his science journey at Columbia University. There, he studied biology and helped trace nerve cells in fish brains. After that, he went to Yale University. He earned his Ph.D. by studying how the eyes and brains of fruit flies develop.
From 1977 to 1979, he worked at Stanford University. He learned how to copy genes, which was a very new and exciting field at the time. This skill helped him study living things at a very tiny level.
Working at Caltech
Since 1980, Dr. Meyerowitz has been a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He even led the Biology division there from 2000 to 2010. He is now a special professor of biology at Caltech.
For a couple of years (2011-2013), he also worked in England. He helped start the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
Discoveries in Plant Science
Dr. Meyerowitz first became an expert on Drosophila melanogaster, which are tiny fruit flies. But then, he became a leader in studying Arabidopsis thaliana. This is a small flowering plant, often called thale cress. It's a very important plant for scientists to study.
How Plants Grow and Develop
Dr. Meyerowitz is well known for figuring out how plants sense hormones. Hormones are like chemical messages that tell plants what to do. He also discovered how flowers and plant shoots get their shape. He studied the tiny growing tips of plants called meristems.
More recently, he has been using ideas from physics to understand plant growth. Many top plant scientists today were once students in his lab. These include Xuemei Chen and Detlef Weigel.
Awards and Honors
Dr. Meyerowitz has received many important awards for his work. He won the Genetics Society of America Medal in 1996. In 1997, he received the International Prize for Biology from Japan. He also won the Balzan Prize in 2006 for his work on plant genetics. In 2024, he was given the Wolf Prize in Agriculture.
He is also a member of many important science groups. These include the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in the UK. He has also led several major science societies.
Related pages
- ABC model of flower development
- History of research on Arabidopsis thaliana
