Palisadian Earns Prestigious Award for Genetics Research

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) has named Palisadian Leonid Kruglyak, PhD, the 2015 recipient of the Curt Stern Award.

Named for the late pioneering geneticist, Curt Stern, PhD, the award recognizes outstanding scientific achievements in human genetics over the past decade.

Kruglyak is a professor of human genetics and biological chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

The geneticist is fairly new to the Palisades.

“We moved to the Alphabet Streets from New Jersey two years ago and love the neighborhood,” Kruglyak told the Palisadian-Post. “It has a great small-town feel, with friendly and welcoming neighbors. We enjoy being able to walk to the Village and especially appreciate the proximity to hiking and biking trails in the Santa Monica Mountains as well as to the beach.”

Kruglyak will be honored on Oct. 9 during the society’s 65th annual meeting in Baltimore.

Kruglyak devoted his early career to understanding how a person’s genes interact with each other and the environment to influence his or her traits, such as appearance, behavior and susceptibility to various diseases.

As a postdoctoral researcher in the mid-1990s, he developed algorithms for a computer program called GENEHUNTER. The program enabled scientists to perform complicated calculations for genetic linkage on personal computers and quickly became a standard tool for mapping complex disease genes.

Over the next decade, he published key papers predicting the number of genetic markers required for genome-wide association studies in humans, and pioneered the field of genetics of global gene expression (now known as eQTL analysis).

More recently, Kruglyak’s laboratory has used genomic technology to establish the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as models for studying complex genetic variations.

A member of ASHG since 1999 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2007, Kruglyak has earned many awards, including the James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in Human Genetics and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Innovation Award in Functional Genomics.

In 2007, ISI Thomson Scientific named Kruglyak a highly cited researcher in molecular biology and genetics—his work has been cited more than 40,000 times by scientific literature.

Kruglyak graduated from Princeton University in 1987 and earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in physics from UC Berkeley in 1989 and 1990, respectively.