Kendall elected AAAS fellow

Debra A. Kendall, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and associate dean, CLAS, will join the new class of fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal, Science.

Kendall was cited “for distinguished contributions to the field of membrane protein biochemistry, particularly for advances in protein transport and signal transduction systems.”

Her research focuses on cellular activities that take place at the cell membrane, an area of study that has grown rapidly in the past decade as scientists seek to learn how information is transmitted from outside to inside the cell, knowledge that can determine how drugs and therapeutic treatments are designed.

Her large research program at UConn is funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and she was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Career Advancement Award. Her work has been funded for 24 consecutive years by NIH and last year brought in $3 million in research grants to UConn.

Kendall is an editor for the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and recently completed a term on the editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

A graduate of Smith College in biochemistry, she received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University, followed by postdoctoral study at Rockefeller University. She has taught at UConn since 1989 and has been active in mentoring minority students and young women beginning their science careers. She is a former chair of the University Senate Executive Committee and is in her third year as an associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Kendall lives in Glastonbury, CT. Her husband, Dave Osterman, is a biochemist at BioRelix in New Haven. They have two daughters, one a sophomore at Wesleyan University and the other a junior at Glastonbury High School.