Graham Hatfull Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Graham Hatfull standing in front of a wall filled with flasksGraham Hatfull, Eberly Family Professor of Biotechnology in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has been elected a 2020 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hatfull’s work with SEA-PHAGES, a national program that teaches undergraduates students to discover bacteriophages led to the creation of a phage cocktail that was used to fight an antibiotic resistant infection in a 15-year old lung transplant patient.

Hatfull joins a class of 276 new members that includes immunologist Yasmine Belkaid, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. and singer Joan Baez.

News of the Hatfull lab’s lifesaving international collaboration spread fast. Read more about these research efforts in Pittwire.

“This is a truly wonderful honor, recognizing the tremendous efforts of the researchers in my lab and our collaborators over many years,” said Hatfull. “It is humbling to join an academy with such wonderful and distinguished artists and scientists.”

AAAS was founded in 1780 and its projects and publications generate ideas and offer recommendations to advance the public good in the arts, citizenship, education, energy, government, the humanities, international relations, science and more. In addition to more than a dozen current Pitt faculty members, AAAS membership includes Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost and Martin Luther King Jr.

“The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites and they have led in board rooms and courtrooms,” said Academy President David W. Oxtoby in a release. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the Academy’s work to advance the public good.”

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