Texas A&M Professor Chosen as Honorary Member of International Society for Animal Genetics
Dr. Leif Andersson, Governor’s University Research Initiative (GURI) faculty fellow and professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, was recently named an honorary member of the International Society for Animal Genetics (ISAG). Only 16 scientists have received this prestigious recognition since ISAG was established as an international society for research on animal genetics in 1974. Andersson is the second honoree to be affiliated with Texas A&M University—the first being Dr. James Womack, professor in the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology.
“The first international conference I attended in my life was the ISAG conference in Ottowa in 1982, where I presented the genetic mapping of chestnut and roan color in horses. It is wonderful to now become an honorary member of ISAG 34 years and about 370 published papers later,” Andersson said.
“He is a leader in solving complex problems in animal and human health and leverages advances in genomic technologies to make great strides in the field of genomics,” said Dr. Evelyn Castiglioni, department head of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (CVM) at Texas A&M.
Andersson, former Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Studies Faculty Fellow, has made a number of contributions to the field of genetics, which have applications in veterinary medicine and agriculture. Additionally, he has published more than 370 scientific articles and has received six patents and filed applications for two more.
The ISAG membership is not Andersson’s first honor. He has also been uniquely elected to four major scientific royal societies in Sweden (Royal Swedish Society for Agriculture and Forestry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala and the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund) and was elected as a Foreign Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He received the Wolf price in Agriculture in 2014. He was also one of five faculty members at Texas A&M awarded a GURI Grant
ISAG facilitates workshops and conferences that promote collaboration and knowledge sharing within the field of genetics. The society also publishes an official journal, Animal Genetics.
