ASPB Past President Daniel Cosgrove Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Daniel Cosgrove

The National Academy of Sciences recently announced the election of 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 14 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

ASPB members are delighted to see that among the newly elected is Daniel J. Cosgrove, Eberly Professor of Biology, Department of Biology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Cosgrove served as president of ASPB from 2000 to 2001. He is a native of Massachusetts and earned a bachelor’s degree in botany at the University of Massachusetts in 1974. In 1972 , he opted for a junior year at the University of Oregon in Eugene. From 1974 to 1979, he was a graduate student at Stanford University, where he received a Ph.D. in biological sciences. He did postdoctoral stints at the University of Washington and the Nuclear Research Center at Juelich, Germany. In 1983, he joined the Penn State faculty as assistant professor, advancing to associate professor in 1987 and professor in 1991.

Cosgrove’s research deals with the mechanisms of plant cell growth. In the early 1980s he pioneered the use of the pressure microprobe to evaluate hydraulic constraints on cell enlargement. This work led to theoretical and experimental analyses of wall stress relaxation as the key biophysical process controlling cell enlargement. Searching for proteins with wall loosening functions, his group was the first to isolate expansin proteins and to show that they are responsible for the acid-growth behavior of cell walls. Expansin cloning led to the recognition that expansins make up a large multigene family and to the discovery of a second family of expansins that include some notorious grass pollen allergens. Recent work in Cosgrove’s lab is focused on the developmental, structural, and evolutionary aspects of the expansin gene superfamily, as well as on biochemical and biophysical studies of additional mechanisms controlling cell wall enlargement.

At Penn State Cosgrove has taught introductory plant physiology and a variety of more advanced courses on plant growth and development, membrane transport, and laboratory uses of computers. He has served on the editorial boards of Plant Physiology, Planta, Plant Cell and Environment, Physiologia Plantarum, and other professional journals and on the governing boards of the American Society for Photobiology and the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the ASPB Charles A. Shull Award for outstanding investigations in plant physiology. In 1993, he was elected a fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science.

The NAS election was held during the business session of the 142nd annual meeting of the academy. Election to membership in the academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. The total number of active members is now 1,976.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln that calls on the academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.

Also elected to the academy is Robert E. Davis, supervisory research plant pathologist and research leader at the USDA Agricultural Research Service and elected as “foreign associate” David C. Baulcombe; head, Sainsbury Laboratory, and professor, John Innes Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich (United Kingdom).