John G. Hildebrand, Biographical information |
I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942 and grew up in Belmont, MA, where I had all of my precollege education in the town's public schools. By the time I graduated from high school in 1960 and entered Harvard College in Cambridge, MA, I had developed my two life passions: biology and classical music. Having settled on a major in biology, I had the good fortune to work with John Law, then a young faculty member associated with Konrad Bloch's research group in the Chemistry Department. Law not only gave me an unlimited opportunity to immerse myself in laboratory research, but also generously encouraged and aided my scientific development and guided me through the authorship of my first publication and my first presentation at a scientific meeting. Upon receiving the A.B. degree in 1964, I began graduate studies at the Rockefeller Institute (later to become the Rockefeller University) in New York City. After invaluable experiences in the laboratories of George Palade and Christian de Duve, I found my way to the research group headed by Fritz Lipmann. With Lipmann and his long-time colleague Leonard Spector as mentors, I completed a dissertation in the realm of bio-organic chemistry, energy metabolism, and mechanisms of enzymatic reactions. In retrospect one of the most important experiences of my life was a chance encounter in 1965, at the new-book shelf in the Rockefeller library, with a little book by Kenneth Roeder, Nerve Cells and Insect Behavior. Once I started to read that book, I couldn't put it down, and when I had finished it several hours later, I knew what I wanted to do as a scientist. By the time I received the Ph.D. degree in 1969, I had decided to join the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School for postdoctoral research training. Fortunate to work with Ed Kravitz and strongly influenced by Steve Kuffler, Ed Furshpan, David Hubel, David Potter, and Torsten Wiesel, as well as a cadre of extraordinary fellow trainees, my three years as a postdoc were exhilarating and profoundly stimulating. In 1972, I accepted an appointment as an Assistant Professor in the same department, established my independent lab, and launched a program of research on the metamorphosis of the nervous system of the giant sphinx moth Manduca sexta. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 1977. In 1980 I moved to the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University in New York City, attracted by an invitation to help build a section devoted to developmental neurobiology. Shortly after my move to Columbia, a casual encounter during a seminar trip introduced me to Gail Burd, a postdoctoral neuroscientist who quickly became a very special friend and colleague and, before long, my wife and life companion. About the same time, another unforeseen opportunity developed when I was invited by the University of Arizona (UA) to consider a challenging assignment in Tucson -- namely, to develop a research group in invertebrate neurobiology. That call proved irresistible, and in 1985 Gail and I headed westward together with my long-standing coworker Tom Christensen and three other members of our New York lab group. Thus the Arizona Research Laboratories Division of Neurobiology (ARLDN) was inaugurated in December, 1985. At the UA, my primary appointment (which since 1989 has been a Regents Professorship) is in Neurobiology, and I hold joint appointments in Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Entomology, and Molecular & Cellular Biology. Since 1985 I have also served as Director of the ARLDN, an in the period 1986-97 I was Chairman of the Committee on Neuroscience, the UA-wide consortium of faculty members responsible for the UA's Ph.D. Program in Neuroscience. My research program focuses on moths as experimental models and emphasizes studies of olfaction, neuroethology, chemical ecology of insect-host interactions, neural development, and neurochemistry and neurosecretion. In my teaching and activity as a mentor, I am equally dedicated to undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral education. One of my strong interests is science education for members of underrepresented minority groups, and I served for several years on the Advisory Committee for the Minority Fellowship Program in Neuroscience under the auspices of the American Psychological Association, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs. Among my other major responsibilities are: President of the International Society for Chemical Ecology; Past-President of the International Society for Neuroethology; co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Physiology A; and co-founder and member of the Executive Committee of the UA Center for Insect Science. See Curriculum vitae |
