SALT LAKE CITY — Three professors at the University of Utah have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professors Bradley R. Cairns, Dana Carroll and Christopher D. Hacon join 225 U.S. scholars, scientists, writers, artists, as well as civic, business and philanthropic leaders in the organization.
Since its founding in 1780, the academy, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has served the nation as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue and useful knowledge.
Cairns, professor and chairman of oncological sciences and senior director of basic science at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, was honored for his work examining how chromatin, the structures that package chromosomal DNA, switch genes on or off. He is working to understand how changes in chromatin affect cellular mechanisms that can lead to cancer development.
Carroll, distinguished professor of biochemistry, has been on the faculty at the U. for 42 years. Starting 21 years ago, he developed the earliest of the precise genome editing platforms, zinc-finger nucleases and has worked with them and successor technologies, all of which are being used around the world to learn the consequences of specific mutations, to improve agricultural plant and animals, and to develop treatments for human diseases.
Hacon, distinguished professor of mathematics, is a scholar of algebraic geometry, the field of mathematics that studies geometric objects defined by polynomial equations. He is particularly interested in objects that exist in more than three dimensions, and he and his colleagues have applied studies of these objects to extend the “minimal model program,” a foundational principle of algebraic geometry, into higher dimensions.