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Hanna H. Gray, Chairman of the HHMI Trustees, praised Cech's contributions to the Institute. “Tom Cech has been a superb leader for the HHMI, and we have been greatly privileged to have worked with him as he has guided its ever expanding activities and opened up new initiatives of large significance in pursuit of the Institute's mission,” said Gray, the President Emeritus and Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Chicago. “Tom's scientific accomplishment and judgment, his deep commitment to strengthening the reach of science education, and his concern for the welfare of the scientific enterprise at the highest level of quality have made a deep and enduring impact. We are enormously grateful for Tom's contribution and for the remarkable period of the Institute's history he has shaped to such effect,” she concluded. Cech's tenure as president of HHMI has been marked by innovation and significant programmatic expansion and he noted that the timing of the decision was also dictated by his belief that sustained leadership would be required of any new initiatives contemplated by HHMI. Under his leadership, the Institute opened its first freestanding campus - the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Va. - as a new model for conducting interdisciplinary research. “Continuity of leadership has been essential for Janelia Farm,” said Cech. “The `next great thing' needs that same leadership commitment over an extended period of time.” Once a successor is in place, Cech said, he plans to resume his position as an HHMI investigator at the University of Colorado, where he has been a faculty member since 1978. Cech shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman of Yale University for their independent discoveries that illuminated the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech has overseen fundamental changes in HHMI's flagship investigator program. He introduced focused competitions to identify exceptional physician-scientists and broadened the Institute's definition of biomedicine to embrace interdisciplinary research that embraces chemists, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists. HHMI also changed the way it selects investigators to ensure that candidates are drawn from a broader and deeper pool of scientists who apply directly to the Institute instead of being nominated by their home institutions. And more recently, HHMI announced its first ever competition for early career scientists. Known at the University of Colorado as a lively and engaging teacher, Cech has emphasized initiatives that bridge HHMI's science education and research activities. Through the HHMI professors program, the Institute supports accomplished research scientists who are also committed to transforming undergraduate science education. The EXROP program - short for exceptional research opportunities - provides research experiences for talented undergraduates and shows great promise for increasing diversity within academic science. Cech, 60, is a graduate of Grinnell College in Iowa and obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty at the University of Colorado after engaging in postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cech was named an HHMI investigator in 1988. In 1982, Cech and his research group announced that an RNA molecule from Tetrahymena, a single-celled pond organism, cut and rejoined chemical bonds in the complete absence of proteins. This discovery of self-splicing RNA provided the first exception to the long-held belief that biological reactions are always catalyzed by proteins. Cech has maintained an active research program throughout his tenure as HHMI president. His laboratory now studies the activity and regulation of telomerase, a key enzyme for replicating the ends of chromosomes. www.HealthNewsDigest.com Top of Page 
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