The ninth annual CEPCEB awards ceremony will take place on Friday, December 16, 2011, from 2-4pm in the Genomics Building Auditorium. The 2011 Noel T. Keen Lecturer is Rob Martienssen, a Professor and HHMI/GBMF Investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Since 2002, CEPCEB has recognized research excellence in plant cell biology, genomics and bioinformatics by pre-college students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers with an annual award ceremony. The CEPCEB Award Fund also sponsors an annual Special Seminar where an invited leading scientist presents his or her work. 

The title of Dr. Martienssen’s talk is: “RNAi , Heterochromatin Reprogramming and Germ Cell Fate in Arabidopsis.”  Dr. Martienssen ­received his Ph.D. from the Plant Breeding ­Institute at Cambridge University in 1986. He held an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at ­Berkeley before ­taking a faculty position at CSHL in 1989. Dr. Martienssen was a co-recipient of the Kumho International Science Award in 2001, and was the 2003 recipient of the Newcomb Cleveland award, an acknowledgment by AAAS that his 2002 paper in Science magazine was the best of the year. He was appointed a ­Fellow of the Royal Society of ­London in 2006 and named a ­Howard Hughes ­Medical ­Institute (HHMI) and Gordon and ­Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF) Investigator in plant sciences in 2011.

Dr. Martienssen, who leads the plant biology group at CSHL, is a plant geneticist and pioneer in unraveling epigenetic mechanisms, which help control how genes work. He is an expert on the methylation of transposable elements in plant genomes, and has also developed ­reverse genetics strategies using transposons in maize and Arabidopsis that have become powerful and widely used tools in plant genetics research.