New interim dean of biological sciences named

G. Steven Martin, a distinguished professor of cell and developmental biology who first came to Berkeley from England as a postdoctoral fellow in 1968, has been appointed interim dean of biological sciences in the College of Letters and Science, effective July 1. He takes over for Mark Schlissel, who was recently named provost of Brown University.

G. Steven Martin

Martin, a U.S. citizen born in Oxford, earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology at Cambridge University before coming to work for three years as a postdoc in Berkeley’s virus laboratory. Following a stint on the staff of London’s Imperial Cancer Research Fund he returned to Berkeley in 1975, this time as an assistant professor in the Department of Zoology and assistant research virologist in the campus’s cancer research laboratory.

He joined the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology in 1989, and has served as department chair since 2007.

Martin’s awards and honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and the American Cancer Society Scholar Award in Cancer Research. He was the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology from 2002 to 2007, and since 1998 has been a Fellow of the Royal Society, established in 1660 and believed to be the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.