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James Gentile Is President of
International Scientific Association

Posted November 20, 2001

HOLLAND -- Dr. James Gentile of the Hope College faculty has been elected president of the International Association of Environmental Mutagen Societies (IAEMS).

The international group is a coalition of 11 national or regional Environmental Mutagen Societies, and has approximately 10,000 members worldwide. Gentile, whose four-year term began this fall, will serve through the association's next quadrennial international conference, which will be held in October of 2005 in San Francisco, Calif.

Gentile is the dean for the natural sciences and the Kenneth G. Herrick Professor of Biology at Hope, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1976.

He was president of the 2,500-member North American Environmental Mutagen Society from 1992 to 1994. He received the society's Alexander Hollaender Award for excellence in research and education in March of this year; the EMS Student Educator of the Year Award in 1998; and the EMS Service Recognition Award in 1994.

He is currently editor-in-chief of the international journal "Mutation Research." He has conducted research in environmental mutagenesis for more than a quarter century, and has authored or co-authored more than 160 scientific publications since 1974.

In other professional activity, he is a member of three National Research Council committees: the Committee on Undergraduate Science Education (CUSE), a standing committee of the Center for Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education; the committee on "Undergraduate Biology Education to Prepare Research Scientists for the 21st Century"; and the Board on the Life Sciences, the last of which he serves as the only representative from a liberal arts college. The National Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Gentile is also a member of the Executive Committee of "Project Kaleidoscope," a Washington, D.C.- based initiative focusing on identifying and promoting effective models for undergraduate mathematics and science education, and he is also a member of the Board of Governors for the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research.

He is a consultant for the National Institutes of Health Sciences, and is serving, at the appointment of Governor John Engler, on Michigan's State Hazardous Site Assessment Committee. He is a consultant with the EPA's Office on Substances/Test Rules Development Branch, and a past consultant to the EPA's Science Advisory Board. He is also a scientific program advisor to the Murdock Trust in Vancouver, Wash., the Research Corporation in Tucson, Ariz., and the Sherman Fairchild Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Among other honors in addition to his awards from EMS, he has received the Cancer Research Medallion Award of the National Cancer Institute of Japan (1997) and the Scientific Recognition Medal of Provincia Di Pisa, Italy (1995).

He received his bachelor's degree in biology/chemistry from St. Mary's University in 1968, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Illinois State University in 1970 and 1974. The Illinois State University Alumni Association presented him with an Alumni Achievement Award in 1995.

The goal of the IAEMS is to support and encourage international cooperation among member societies and individuals engaged in research on the causes and consequences of exposure to genotoxic substances in the environment.

In addition to its quadrennial conference, the association coordinates three other international conferences: the International Workshops on Genotoxicity Testing, to be next held in Alaska in 2002; the International Conference on Environmental Mutagens in Human Populations, to be next held in Brazil in 2003; and the International Conference on Mechanisms of Antimutagenesis and Anticarcinogenesis, to be next held in Italy in 2005. Through its foundation, the IAEMS seeks to promote research and enhance understanding globally concerning the mutational basis of human disease and related issues.

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