Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize - 2011

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Jeffery Hall, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Biology
Brandeis University

Jeffrey C. Hall putatively became a geneticist during his college and grad-student years. During a subsequent postdoctoral stint he made a lateral move into behavior- and neuro-genetics (much as a duck might make a lateral move à l’orange). This apprenticeship led to a faculty position at Brandeis University, which Hall held from 1974 though 2007. He retired, at last, after tenuously clinging to a 2-year teaching position at the University of Maine (ending late 2009)—unfortunately not then instructing in the area of his almost first love (a Civil War subject, with reference to a course Hall taught at in the History Department at Brandeis, 1990s into the aughts).

As a post-doc and faculty-level researcher, Hall, co-workers, and collaborating investigators performed research in areas revolving round the genetics and molecular-neurobiology of reproductive behavior in Drosophila. During the late 1970s, a discovery in Hall’s lab that an element of fruitfly courtship is rhythmic stimulated him to expand his genetic inquiries into chronobiology - studies that continued in parallel with the reproductively based ones. Both kinds of investigations encompassed isolation of novel behavioral mutants; identification of mutationally defined genes; and manipulations of the latter, aimed at elucidating the neural substrates of courtship behavior and that which is governed by Drosophila’s circadian clock. Because the molecular side of behavioral genetics points to the products of pertinent genes, elements of Hall’s and associates’ research entailed analyses of the mechanisms supported by such molecules - which in turn support neural functions that underlie reproductive and rhythmic behaviors. Many of the latter studies at Brandeis were performed via collaborations between the Hall lab and that of Michael Rosbash (located then & now at the same university west of Boston).

Hall is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Genetics Society of America Medal (2003) and, along with Rosbash and Michael Young (Rockefeller University), the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2009).