Sonnenfeld honored for distinguished service Gerald Sonnenfeld, vice president for research, recently received the 2004 Orr E. Reynolds Distinguished Service Award from the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology.

Sonnenfeld is an internationally recognized immunologist and a groundbreaking space-flight researcher whose experiments have been part of several space shuttle flights and three Russian biosatellites. His research focuses on how space flight affects the immune system and, among his many awards, he has been recognized with the Founders Award by the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology. He holds two U.S. patents and one from Canada, and is a member of numerous professional organizations including the American Association of Immunologists, the American Society for Microbiology, the American Society for Virology and the Surgical Infection Society. He is a founding board member of the Tissue Engineering Society.

The American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology (ASGSB) was founded in 1984 to foster research, education, training and development in gravitational and space biology. Society members are drawn from university, government and industry and represent many disciplines bonded by an interest in a common issue – gravity. The society offers a forum for the exchange of scientific data from basic to applied research. Each spring, it publishes a journal of peer-reviewed original articles. The society also provides teacher aids covering topics of interest to space biologists available at http://www.asgsb.org.

Before his appointment last summer as vice president for research, Sonnenfeld was chair of the Department of Microbiology, Biochemistry and Immunology and associate dean for basic sciences and graduate studies at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.