Paul Nurse elected trustee of HHMI

Rockefeller University President Paul Nurse has been elected a trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a medical research organization dedicated to the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge in the life sciences. HHMI announced Nurse’s election on December 14.

Nurse, 56, is one of 11 trustees of HHMI, which is one of the world’s largest philanthropies and provides financial support to a variety of biomedical research and scientific education endeavors, including 12 Rockefeller scientists who are HHMI investigators. The institute has an endowment valued at $14.8 billion and awarded over $700 million in grants in fiscal year 2005.

Nurse, who has been president of Rockefeller since 2003, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001 for fundamental discoveries concerning control of the cell cycle. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.