Senior scientific officer, Josephine Briggs, and scientific officer, Edwin McCleskey, join the team supporting HHMI investigators across the country.

HHMI has appointed researcher and physician Josephine P. Briggs as senior scientific officer and neuroscientist Edwin W. McCleskey as scientific officer, effective September 1, 2006.

Both will work from the Institute’s headquarters in Chevy Chase, Maryland, to support the research of HHMI investigators across the country.

Briggs comes to HHMI from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. She served as co-chair of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) working group responsible for implementing key elements of the NIH Roadmap, which aims to facilitate the translation of basic discoveries into clinical applications. Briggs has played a leading role in developing genomic resources for zebrafish, an important model organism for the study of development and disease. Her research on kidney physiology resulted in more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and led to a greater understanding of progressive renal disease, hypertension, and congestive heart failure.

Briggs received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School and did her residency training at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Before moving to NIH in 1997, she spent 12 years at the University of Michigan Medical School as a faculty member in the department of internal medicine and physiology. Before that, she was a research scientist at the University of Munich.

McCleskey will remain a senior scientist and professor at the Vollum Institute for Advanced Biomedical Research, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). He was director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at OHSU from 1996 to 2002 and has served as co-director of the neurobiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, since 2004. McCleskey has made significant contributions to our knowledge of ion channel function and how opiates suppress pain. His work helped discern the role of acid-sensing ion channels in ischemic heart pain, an important signal in cardiovascular disease and myocardial infarction.

McCleskey received his Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Washington, and did postdoctoral training at Yale University School of Medicine. He was a faculty member at Washington University School of Medicine from 1987 to 1993, before joining the Vollum Institute.

Photos: Paul Fetters