VOLUME 12, NUMBER 22 • MAY 18, 2001

Trustee Tilghman is Named President of Princeton

Rockefeller University trustee Shirley Tilghman has been named the next president of Princeton University. Tilghman is the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences at Princeton University, director of its Institute for Integrative Genomics, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Trustee Shirley Tilghman, who conducted groundbreaking work in genetics, will be the first female president of Princeton University.

In the lab, Tilghman studies imprinted genes, which, unlike other genes, have patterns of activity that differ depending on whether they are inherited from a male or female parent. Her discoveries are helping to explain how imprinted genes may serve as weapons in a biochemical "battle of the sexes."

Tilghman is a member of the The Rockefeller University Board of Trustees. She is also a member of the Committee on Scientific Affairs and is co-chair of the Educational Affairs Committee.

Tilghman received a B.Sc. from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, in 1968. After two years teaching secondary school in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she went on to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Temple University.

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health and an investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research, Fox Chase, before moving to Princeton in 1986.

A fellow of The Royal Society of London and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine, Tilghman helped set the blueprint for the current U.S. effort in the Human Genome Project.