Sarah Elgin

Sarah C.R. Elgin is an American biochemist and geneticist. She is the Viktor Hamburger Professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is noted for her work in epigenetics, gene regulation, and heterochromatin, and for her contributions to science education.

Early life and education
Sarah "Sally" Elgin was born in Washington, DC. She grew up in Salem, Oregon. In high school, Elgin studied fallout levels in Oregon rainwater after nuclear weapons tests in the Soviet Union. She received her B.A. in chemistry from Pomona College in 1967. While at Pomona, she participated in a summer research program at the University of Leeds characterizing the egg stalk of the green lacewing fly Chrysopa vittata. Elgin did her graduate work in the lab of James Bonner at the California Institute of Technology, isolating and characterizing nonhistone chromosomal proteins from rat livers. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1972. Elgin stayed at Caltech for her postdoctoral research, working in the lab of Leroy Hood. She continued to isolate and characterize nonhistone chromosomal proteins but started studying Drosophila.

Academic career and research
After her postdoc, Elgin joined the faculty in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University, where her lab pioneered immunostaining of polytene chromosomes from Drosophila larval salivary glands and nuclease digestion assays.

In 1981, Elgin joined the faculty in the Department of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her lab isolated and characterized Heterochromatin Protein 1 in Drosophila (now known as Su(var)205 or HP1a). To probe chromatin environments, her lab developed a P element construct with a copy of the white gene driven by the hsp70 promoter. When this reporter gene is inserted into heterochromatic environments, the fly eyes display a variegating phenotype, whereas when the P element is inserted into euchromatin the fly eyes show a red phenotype; this phenomenon is known as Position-effect variegation. Nuclease digestion assays have confirmed that the eye phenotypes are indicative of the chromatin environment surrounding the P element insertion site. In 2006, Elgin was named as the inaugural Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences.

At Washington University, in the St. Louis area, and nationally, Elgin has been active in science education. She founded the Washington University Science Outreach program in 1989 and has been active in science education in the University City school district.

In 2002 Elgin became an HHMI Professor with the goal to develop core curriculum to integrate primary research in genomics with a college course called Phage Bioinformatics. In addition, Elgin has collaborated with professors all over the country to improve the sequence annotation of different species of Drosophila fruit flies, especially for the dot chromosome. This project is a consortium of 174 member colleges and universities who participate in sequence improvement and annotation projects with the goal of publishing the results in primary research journals and also publishing data on learning experiences for students taking research-intensive classes based on GEP data.

Genomics Education Partnership
In June 2005, Elgin held a one-day hands-on introductory workshop at Washington University in St. Louis, to show visiting faculty what her students were able to do in genome annotation. The 17 faculty who attended all signed on to a proposal to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to establish the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP). The HHMI grant was funded, and GEP’s first cohort of members attended a full training workshop in June 2006.

Awards and honors

 * National Academy of Sciences, 2018
 * Bruce Alberts Award for Excellence in Science Education (American Society for Cell Biology), 2006, shared with A. Malcolm Campbell
 * Award for Exemplary Contributions to Education (American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), 2007
 * Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education (Genetics Society of America), 2009
 * American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2012