Alex Kolodkin named as AAAS Fellow
Primary Neuroscience member Dr. Alex Kolodkin has been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers in recogniztion of their advancement of science. The newly elected fellows will each be awarded a certificate and a rosette pin during the AAAS Fellows Forum on Feb. 14 at the 2015 AAAS annual meeting in San Jose, Calif.
Dr. Kolodkin is a professor of neuroscience in the School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Kolodkin was honored for groundbreaking discoveries in developmental neurobiology that have revealed the roles of semaphorin proteins in axon guidance and in neural circuit formation. As a postdoctoral fellow, Kolodkin discovered and cloned the first semaphorin gene, revealing a family of proteins that include members that guide neuron growth in the correct direction. His research is currently focused on understanding how neurons connect to each other during development. His team at Johns Hopkins has defined signals involved in muscle-nerve connections in fruit flies, mechanisms that direct synapse formation in mammals and critical connectivity events in the mammalian visual system. Kolodkin and colleagues continue to investigate how guidance cues orchestrate neuronal wiring during development, using fruit flies and mice as model systems.