Joy Bergelson Named Next Director of Simons Foundation’s Life Sciences Division
The Simons Foundation is delighted to announce that evolutionary biologist Joy Bergelson joined the Simons Foundation in January as a director of the foundation’s Life Sciences division. Bergelson currently shares this role with founding director Marian Carlson, who plans to retire this year. At the foundation, Bergelson will develop and implement a new grant portfolio for the division focusing on ecology and evolutionary biology. She will maintain a joint appointment with New York University, where she is the Silver Professor in the Department of Biology.
“Joy is a proven leader in the life sciences who has pioneered many significant studies in ecology and evolution,” says Simons Foundation President David Spergel. “Her vision and deep expertise will be instrumental in leading the division into its next phase.”
Specifically, Bergelson will launch new grants programs to further understand and predict the dynamics of natural systems by investigating topics such as biodiversity, plant biology, disease and biological resilience. This work is fundamental to dissecting the drivers of these complex systems and has implications for understanding the impacts of climate change and other environmental perturbations.
“I’ve always had a passion for the life sciences and for solving puzzles, especially regarding how to extrapolate across scales: from ecological to evolutionary time scales or from molecules to organisms to ecological communities,” says Bergelson. “There’s still so much for us to learn, and by bringing talented minds together, I’m confident we will make important discoveries.”
Bergelson previously served as a Senior Fellow of the Simons Society of Fellows. “I first became a part of the Simons community as a fellow and have been impressed by how the foundation identifies and supports seminal areas of research that might struggle to find funding elsewhere,” she says. “This is especially true in the evolution and ecology space, which typically doesn’t have the resources to conduct big, longitudinal studies. I’m excited to enable more large-scale, collaborative projects to move the field forward.”
Bergelson will assume the Life Sciences division directorship from Marian Carlson, who has led the division since 2013. Carlson joined the foundation in 2010 and will stay on through the end of the year. Carlson launched and oversaw grantmaking programs that illuminated fundamental questions in oceanography, microbial ecology and the origins of life on Earth.
“It has been an honor to lead this division and to work with so many talented scientists dedicated to furthering basic research in the life sciences,” says Carlson. “I wish Joy all the best as she assumes this role and look forward to seeing all she will accomplish.”
Bergelson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, an M.Phil. from the University of York in England and a B.Sc. from Brown University. Before joining NYU, Bergelson was the James D. Watson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where she chaired the Department of Ecology and Evolution.
Bergelson’s research investigates the coevolutionary interactions between plants and their pathogens. Her group is best known for dispelling the long-held belief that arms-race dynamics (in which species develop escalating adaptations and counter-adaptations against each other) typify the evolution of plant resistance to pathogens in nature. In working to understand the selective forces shaping plant-associated microbes, her group pioneered the use of genetically manipulated plants to disentangle ecological interactions.
Through international collaborations, Bergelson’s lab was instrumental in developing genome-wide association mapping in Arabidopsis, a flowering plant in the mustard family. The plant’s mapped genome now serves as a critical resource for the research community, and Bergelson’s work ultimately led to the 1001 Genomes project that detailed whole-genome sequence variation in the plant.
Bergelson serves on science advisory boards for TULIP INRAE in France, MiCROP in the Netherlands, the Blavatnik Foundation in New York City and CEPLAS in Germany. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Science, the American Society of Arts and Sciences and the American Society for the Advancement of Science. Her earlier awards include a Marshall Scholarship, a Packard Fellowship and a Presidential Faculty Fellow Award.
