PLoS Genetics Editor-in-Chief
Biography for Wayne N. Frankel
Wayne N. Frankel, Ph.D. is a Senior Staff Scientist at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Dr. Frankel's research is devoted to establishing an understanding of the genetic basis of neurological disorders such as epilepsy using mice as model organisms. His efforts to clone, map and characterize a variety of genes related to neurological phenotypes, and to study them as both genetically simple or complex traits, has led to new insights into genetic control of brain function. Examples of mutations positionally cloned include slow-wave epilepsy, neuromuscular degeneration, stargazer, fidget and weeble.
Dr. Frankel earned both his masters degree and doctorate in genetics from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. His undergraduate degree in biology is from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining The Jackson Laboratory in 1992, he served as a postdoctoral fellow under Dr. John Coffin at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston.
Among his professional activities, Dr. Frankel served on the NCI Advisory Panel on Pre-clinical Models for Cancer Working Group/Mouse Genomics and Genetics, and was an Associate Editor of the scientific journal Genomics from 1997 through 2004. His awards include fellowships from the Leukemia Society of America, as well as the Klingenstein Fellowship for Neuroscience. Dr. Frankel's teaching credits include directing the 1997 graduate-level course, "Experimental Genetics of the Laboratory Mouse" at The Jackson Laboratory, and co-organizing the Workshop in Mouse Molecular Neurogenetics in 1994, 1996, 1999, 2002, and 2004.
Dr. Frankel was the editor of the Brain Research journal "Gene Expression Patterns" from 2000 through 2002 and also served on the scientific advisory board of Digital Gene Technologies in La Jolla, CA until 2004. He has authored or co-authored more than 90 professional research papers in publications including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cell, Mammalian Genome, Genome Research, Genomics, Nature, Journal of Immunology, Science, and Nature Genetics.