The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that Philip Hieter is the recipient of the 2018 George W. Beadle Award, bestowed in honor of his outstanding contributions to the genetics research community. Hieter is Professor of Medical Genetics in the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia.
Geneticists across the model organism and human genetics communities recognize Hieter for his dedication to uniting human biologists with those who work on model organisms such as mice, fruit flies, worms, and yeast. The resulting collaborations are crucial to advancing our knowledge of biology, including human health and disease; connecting model organism researchers and human biologists with one another speeds progress for both groups, facilitates mechanistic understanding of disease gene functions, and helps uncover novel disease mechanisms and candidate therapeutic targets.
In 1997, when few genome sequences were available, Hieter helped create XREFdb, a public database that linked the functional annotations of genes studied in model organisms with the phenotypic annotations on the human and mouse genetic maps. This resource provided cross-species candidate genes for mammalian phenotypes, including human d
