The Award Ceremony was held at the Student Centre's theatre, close to the Department of Biology in Voutes, on Monday, 4 November 2002. It was attended by over 200 persons, including Faculty and staff of the Department of Biology and the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, graduate and undergraduate students, and their guests.
The ceremony was opened with welcome-addresses by Professor Maroudio Kentouri, Chair of the Department of Biology and the Vice Rector of the University, Professor Nikolaos Siafakas. These were followed by a presentation of Professor Ashburner's academic achievements by Professor Kitsos Louis, Department of Biology of the University of Crete.
The diploma was conferred by the Vice Rector, along with a gift presented to him by Prof. Kentouri, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the University of Crete.
Professor Ashburner thanked the Faculty of Department of Biology for the honour, and he then shared with the audience some of his vast knowledge on Drosophila genomics and bioinformatics.
The ceremony was concluded with a musical epilogue: "Improvisation", by D. Zaimakis and D. Hatzakis, members of the Blue Wind Trio. A dinner followed the ceremony at the Student's Centre, during which Professor Ashburner had the chance to meet with the members of the Academic Community in Heraklion and spend some time with them.
Dr. Ashburner is a Professor of Biology at the University of Cambridge, and he was, until recently, the Research Coordinator and Joint head of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Hinxton, U.K. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he received his undergraduate degree and Ph.D., both in genetics. He then went to the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow with Hershell Mitchell. In 1979, he returned to the Department of Genetics in Cambridge where he has been based since. He was Miller Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a Visiting Professor at the University of California Medical School, San Francisco , the University of Pavia, Italy and the University of Crete, Greece. His collaboration with "Cretan Biology" began in 1978, as a co-founder of the "Crete Meetings". These meetings still take place every second year in Kolymbari, focusing on the Developmental and Molecular Biology of Drosophila melanogaster, which has been in Dr. Ashburner's centre of attention for many decades. Dr. Ashburner was a member of the consortium, which recently sequenced the entire genome of this fly. He was the founder of FlyBase, the major database for researchers using Drosophila as a model system, and of the Gene Ontology Consortium, a project aimed at assisting biological databases with a defined taxonomy of gene function. Dr. Ashburner is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academia Europaea; he is a foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, and past president of the British Genetical Society. He also is a Professorial Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
[Michael Ashburner (pdf) ] [The Resolution (pdf)] [The Speech]
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