Judith Eisen
November 20, 2018—CSWS faculty affiliate Judith Eisen is among six University of Oregon professors named as fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among 390 other newly elected members. UO’s five other AAAS fellows and their areas of research are Alice Barkan, biology; Bruce Blonigen, economics; Julie Haack, chemistry and biochemistry; Patrick Phillips, biology; and Monte Westerfield, biology.
“Judith Eisen, a professor in the Department of Biology and the Institute of Neuroscience, examines how neuronal diversity is generated during development. Her lab studies two major components, neurons in the central nervous system and neural crest cells, a fundamental cell type that forms all of our sensory neurons and a variety of other cell types.
“Her early pioneering work was focused on understanding motor neuron development in vertebrates using the zebrafish model and understanding neural crest development. Eisen was cited in the section on biological sciences for ‘seminal research elucidating aspects of the specification and patterning of neurons and neural crest cells in zebrafish.’
“‘I love making new discoveries and I think every scientist will tell you that we are a bunch of people driven by our curiosity,’ Eisen said. ‘Finding out those answers and moving on to the next piece of that puzzle is what drives me, but I’m no different from other scientists, that’s what drives us all.’”
