The passionate life of Simon Chan

摘要

This issue features a collaborative paper [1] between the Ian Korf and the Simon Chan laboratories describing the evolution of centromeric repeats in animal and plant genomes. Simon Chan passed away on August 22 2012 at the age of 38. Although the ongoing work of his coworkers will result in multiple additional papers carrying his name, this is the last paper he actively worked on. Simon was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He graduated with a degree in biochemistry from the Uni versity of Auckland and earned a Ph.D. from UCSF, where he studied yeast telomeres under the guidance of Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn. He did his post doctoral research in the laboratory of Steve Jacobsen at UCLA working on RNA-directed DNA methylation and gene silencing. In 2006, Simon joined the faculty in the Department of Plant Biology at UC Davis. At that time, Simon took his passion for chromosomal biology and epigenetics into a new area: centromeric function and inheritance.