Award at a Glance
Award amount: $1,000 honorarium, up to $2,000 in travel expense reimbursement
Application deadline: Nov. 17
Questions? Contact: Member Communities
Who Can Apply: Membership in APS is not required. Anyone may submit one nomination for the award in a given year.
Award Description
The annual Marion J. Siegman Lectureship Award recognizes an established investigator (Early Career or Established Professional) who has made outstanding contributions to our understanding of muscle contraction and motility and has opened the way for new avenues of investigation in the field.
Nominations are open to anyone conducting research in these fields; membership in APS is not required. Anyone, except members of the selection committee, may be nominated for the award in a given year.
The awardee is invited to present a 45-minute lecture on her/his research at American Physiology Summit. The Awardee is also expected to publish a research/review article on her/his formal lecture in an appropriate APS journal. The awardee will be selected by an award selection committee. You must be nominated for this award. The awardee must attend the American Physiology Summit.
The award recipient will be selected by the 2025 selection committee:
- Joseph Brozinick, Eli Lilly
- Clara Franzini-Armstrong, University of Pennsylvania
- Samantha Harris (Chair), University of Arizona
- Thomas Hawke, McMaster University
- Richard L. Moss, University of Wisconsin
- Marion Siegman, Jefferson Medical College
- Avril Somlyo, University of Virginia Health Sciences Center
- David Warshaw, University of Vermont
Why apply for this award?
It became painfully clear to me (Marion J. Siegman, Oct. 2021) a half-century ago when I submitted my first grant application to the NIH for the study of the Mechanical Properties of Smooth Muscle that in our research on muscle we seem to operate in silos. The Background section of that proposal was devoted to what was then known about smooth muscle, which was little compared to the striated types. Much of the literature focused on vascular smooth muscle compared to a handful of papers on visceral muscles. I diligently summarized all that was relevant to mechanics (thinking that I had done a pretty good job at it) and elaborated on gaps that needed to be filled in the proposed studies. When the review (“Pink sheets”) arrived some months later, I was horrified to read that the grant was not funded, mainly because I failed to include a review of cardiac and skeletal muscle as well.
I dutifully spent months reading all the papers I could find without the benefit of electronic search resources. I then realized that the prevailing model was skeletal muscle, with cardiac mechanics studies just evolving. The resubmitted grant proposal included a tome on the mechanical properties of all muscle types, and, happily, was funded. Lesson learned!
Although technology has developed allowing new approaches for the study of the contractile process to be taken even at the molecular level, the silos remain. So many processes are common to all muscle types and the motility of cells in general. In my view sharing and cross-talk is necessary, so that we can learn from each other and recognize the genius of design in nature in setting fundamental mechanisms in place that are tweaked to perform different tasks as function demands. My hope is that this Special Lecture series will facilitate a dialog among all researchers interested in this fascinating and far-reaching topic, and lead to new discoveries, as well as collaborations.Eligibility
- APS membership is not required. Anyone may submit a nomination for the award in a given year.
- Must be early career or above to apply.
Criteria
Applicants will be asked the following questions:
- Nomination Letter
- Nominee's NIH biosketch or full cv
- Key Publications with Description (Max 10 Publications)
APS membership is invited to submit nominations for the Marion J. Siegman Lecture via online submission.