The Distinguished Service Award is presented to those, selected by the SIVB President, who have demonstrated and given extra effort in support of the SIVB programs and endeavors. The following SIVB members were presented the Distinguished Service Award at the 2004 World Congress, held in San Francisco, California. Additional winners will be listed in future issues of the In Vitro Report.

John Masters

John Masters was a graduate student at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in the Department of Sammy Franks, a pioneer of in vitro techniques who had trained with George Gey. The rest of his career has been spent in clinical departments undertaking translational cancer research. Most of Dr. Master’s research uses in vitro technology – growing primary cultures of human normal and cancer cells to study stem cells and prediction of response to therapy and prognosis. He is currently Director of the Prostate Cancer Research Centre and Vice-President of the European Society of Tissue Culture.

Suzanne Rogers

Dr. Rogers received her undergraduate degree in horticulture at Cornell University, her Masters of Science degree in horticulture at Ohio State University and her PhD degree in Agronomy at the University of Illinois.

Dr. Rogers’ research interests are in the application of regeneration and transformation protocols to generate model systems for the transformation of wetland monocots such as Typha, Juncus, Scirpus, and Carex species. The long-term goals of this research are to transform single-gene traits into freshwater wetland monocots to generate plants that can process and remove heavy metals from polluted waters. She was the first scientist to transform Typha and Juncus species. She has funded this research with grants obtained from the USDA, NASA, and West Virginia Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (WV EPSCoR) and others. She also has interests in the areas of micropropagation, tropical foliage plants and bonsai.

Dr. Rogers has been a member of the SIVB for more than 2 decades. She has served as the vice president of the plant section of SIVB and served on the Student Awards committee for several years. She has served as a reviewer for numerous manuscripts submitted to In Vitro – Plant, Plant Cell Reports, and Plant Cell Tissue and Organ Culture. She is currently a review editor for SIVB.

Colette Rudd

Colette Rudd became interested in mammalian cell culture as an undergraduate biology major at the University of California, San Diego, after taking a cell biology class with Dr. Gordon Sato. As a graduate student, she was first introduced to the SIVB through meetings organized by the local California Branch of the Tissue Culture Association. After receiving a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UCLA, she joined the Society in 1979. She was elected as an officer in the Vertebrate Section, serving as Secretary (88-90), Vice Chairman (90-92) and Chairman (92-94). She was one of the founding members of the Toxicology Section, and has been a member of the Program, Constitution and Bylaws, Publications, Laboratory Materials and Biosafety, and Development Committees at various times over the years. She was an officer of the SIVB for four years, serving as Vice President, Development (1994-96) and as Treasurer (1996-98). During most of these years she was employed as the director of the Cellular Genetics Program at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. She was a principal investigator on NIH grants and contracts, with projects ranging from genetic toxicology to in vitro pharmacology studies with retinoids and other potential chemopreventive agents. Since 1996 she has worked as a consultant and scientist to apply proteomic technologies to the analysis of mammalian cells, and has continued to organize workshops and symposia for the SIVB annual meetings. She feels fortunate to have met many wonderful friends and talented scientists though the SIVB and is proud to be a recipient of both the society’s Distinguished Service Award and the Vertebrate Section Fellow Award.

Amy Wang

Amy Wang received her MS degree in Biochemistry from Indiana University in 1990. Since 2001, Amy has worked as a Senior Scientist at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Her research is focused on metabolic diseases using mammalian cells.

Prior to her work with GSK, Amy was an Advanced Scientist with Rhone-Poulenc Ag Co from 1993-2001. She was involved in establishing insect cell cultures for insecticide screening and gene expression using Bacularviruses. She also coordinated a research project between Rhone-Poulenc Ag. Co. and the USDA Laboratory, characterizing the insect neruonal-like cell lines that she generated.

In 1995, Amy joined SIVB, and soon became an active officer serving this scientific society. She has held positions such as scientific advisor, vice president, and president of the invertebrate section. She has been a member of the program committee since 1997. Amy has used her leadership skills to overcome the difficulties of raising funds for each year’s program since 1996. All of her hard work paid off, as this year was the first time that the invertebrate section independently raised funding for an international conference.

In addition to fundraising, Amy has also organized many outstanding scientific programs. In 2001, she co-chaired the joint symposium “Beyond Genome: Functional Genomics.” In 2004, she chaired the 11th International Congress on Invertebrate Cell and Tissue Culture and working with Dr. Robert Granados and Dr. Karl Maramorosch, co-chaired the symposium “Molecular Engineering and Biology of Invertebrate Cell Cultures: A Tribute to Dr. Thomas Grace and Professor Shangyin Gao.” This conference was a tremendous success.

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