Honeybee geneticist joins American Academy ranks

Robert E. Page Jr. is in good company these days. The Arizona State University professor, two former U.S. presidents, the U.S. chief justice and a Nobel laureate are among the 175 newly elected fellows in the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He joins five other ASU faculty members in the American Academy, a society founded during the American Revolution in 1780 by scholar patriots to honor excellence and to provide service to the nation and the world.

“Our members represent innovative thinkers in every field and profession,” reads a letter from the American Academy, which has a membership of 4,000 American Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members. “Your election, the result of a highly competitive selection process, recognizes your outstanding contributions to your profession, the nation, and the world,” the letter notes.

Page, a Foundation Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, also is the founding director of the college’s School of Life Sciences.

Considered a pioneer in the field of behavioral genetics, Page joined ASU’s faculty in the spring of 2004 from the University of California, Davis, where he was chair of the entomology department. He has had a profound impact in the scientific community through his research on the evolutionary genetics and social behavior of honeybees.

“Rob’s election to the very distinguished American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a wonderful recognition of his outstanding contributions to science. He is the leading honeybee geneticist in the world. A number of now well-known scientists in the U.S. and Europe learned the ropes of sociogenetics in Rob’s laboratory,” says colleague Bert Hoelldobler, an ASU Foundation Professor of life sciences who also is a fellow in the American Academy.

In the 1990s, Page and a group of collaborators were the first to map a single gene responsible for the insects’ complementary sex-determination system. The work was featured on the cover of the journal “Cell.” In subsequent studies, Page and his team gained further insight into the regulation of honeybee foraging, defensive and alarm behavior.

More recently, Page was one of the researchers, who with ASU assistant professor Gro Amdam and program manager M. Kim Fondrk, found a link between social behavior and maternal traits in bees. Their work was featured on the Jan. 5 cover of the journal “Nature.”

“It’s been an amazing year with this election into the American Academy coming on the heels of our paper in ‘Nature,’” Page says. “I was totally surprised because I really don’t think much about getting awards and honors, I stay too busy.”

Page has been exceptionally busy as director of the School of Life Sciences, which was formed in 2003 through the merger of the departments of biology, microbiology and plant biology.

Since then, the school has greatly expanded its faculty and has entered into breakthrough areas of research. “We are moving up and getting noticed because of the outstanding, hardworking faculty and staff who make up the school,” he says.

Part of Page’s excitement is the university’s “incredible social insect group” and the new Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, both housed in a new Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building (ISTB-1).

“The new building and the center and research housed inside is a dream come true,“ Page said at the center’s open house April 14. “ASU has supported these efforts, and me, 100 percent. I am privileged to have the support of ASU Vice President and Dean David Young and Divisional Dean Simon Peacock, and to be able to be a part of this great vision for life sciences.”

“It is exciting to see Rob’s outstanding contributions to science recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rob is an innovative scientist, an innovative administrator and an innovative leader who is shaping the future of science and the future of Arizona State University,” Peacock says.

Page is one of six ASU faculty members, four in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, who are members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to Page and Hoelldobler, the other faculty members from the college are Stephen Joseph Pyne, a Regents Professor in the School of Life Sciences, and Michael Hechter, a Foundation Professor in the School of Global Studies. Other ASU faculty members in the society are Nobel Prize-winning professor of economics Edward Prescott, a Regents’ Professor in the W. P. Carey School of Business, and Milton Clayton Shaw, an emeritus professor of engineering in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

More information about the new class of fellows in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is online at www.amacad.org/news/new2006.aspx.

Carol Hughes, carol.hughes@asu.edu
(480) 965-6375