People of ASP

An ardent Redskins fan, Jon Clardy grew up in Arlington, VA. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University. After serving as Assistant Professor at Iowa State University, he joined the faculty at Cornell University where he remained for over twenty years. In 2002, he joined the Harvard Medical School Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology where he is currently the Hsien Wu and Daisy Yen Wu Professor. He recalls joining ASP and attending his first meeting around 1987. When delivering his Research Achievement Award talk at the 2004 meeting, he chose not to present a retrospective of his career, but focused instead on the lab’s latest work discovering new natural products and new signaling pathways from heterologously expressed environmental DNA. His most memorable ASP meeting was in Santa Cruz in 1996, when grad students who accompanied him to the meeting went to the beach on the last day of the meeting, missing his talk. They reappeared at the banquet that evening with hideous sunburns that gave them away. He also fondly remembers the joint meeting in Amsterdam, where he and his wife Andrea, whose parents grew up in Amsterdam, were able to revisit some of the places she had heard about when she was a child. They also stayed at the hotel where John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their Bed-In for Peace in 1969. As president, he was most proud of his efforts to get more young people (including the author of this biography!) involved on the committees, where the real work of the society is done. (Katherine Maloney)