On TE Day this year, Mobile DNA would especially like to remember late Prof. Haig Kazazian (1937 - 2022).
Prof. Haig Kazazian attended Dartmouth Medical School, and obtained his MD degree at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He trained in pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Hospital and Johns Hopkins Hospital, and in genetics at Hopkins with Barton Childs, MD, and in molecular biology at the NIH with Harvey Itano, MD. He joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1969, becoming a full professor and chief of the Pediatric Genetics Unit in 1977, and director of the Center for Medical Genetics at Johns Hopkins in 1988. In 1994, he was named Chair of the Department of Genetics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Since 2010, he has been a Professor in the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins. Prof. Kazazian is known for discovering much of the normal variation in a cluster of genes involved in production of human hemoglobin. Over the past 30 years his work has led to groundbreaking discoveries about how mobile DNA contributes to human disease and genome evolution and has received a number of honors for his research, most notably the 2008 William Allan Award, the top honor of the American Society of Human Genetics.
From 2015 until 2020, Prof. Kazazian was Mobile DNA Editor-in-Chief. We are very grateful to Prof. Kazazian for the years of his contributions and engagement in the journal.
We invite you to watch the interview Prof. Kazazian gave BMC Podcast three years ago: here.
