Mary Beckerle, executive director of the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, has been named one of five new members of the National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the Director.

The 20-member panel advises the NIH director on policy and planning issues.

Beckerle earned her Ph.D. in molecular, cellular and developmental biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and completed post-doctoral research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds the Ralph E. and Willia T. Main Presidential Endowed Chair in Cancer Research and recently received the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the U.'s most prestigious award.

Earlier awards include the American Cancer Society Sword of Hope and a Governor's Medal for Science and Technology. In 1999, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rothschild-Mayent Scholar of the Institute Curie.

Beckerle served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology in 2006, as a member of the Public Affairs Advisory Committee of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, and on scientific review panels for the National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Her laboratory has discovered novel components of the machinery that controls cell movement, a process that is critical for normal embryonic development as well as pathological conditions such as tumor metastasis.