Waisman Center director Marsha M. Seltzer announced the appointments of two new associate directors: Len Abbeduto as Waisman Center Associate Director for the Behavioral Sciences and Albee Messing as Waisman Center Associate Director for the Biological Sciences.
Leonard Abbeduto is faculty coordinator of the Waisman Center’s Research Participation Core, Director of the NICHD-funded post-doctoral training and the Merck Scholars II pre-doctoral training programs at the Waisman Center, and chair of the Department of Educational Psychology. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1982 and completed post-doctoral training at the Kennedy Center of Vanderbilt University. He joined the faculty of the UW-Madison’s Department of Educational Psychology and the Waisman Center in 1987. Abbeduto’s research focuses on the speech and language problems of children and adolescents with developmental disabilities, such as Down syndrome and fragile X syndrome, and on the ways in which families cope with disability. Abbeduto received the Emil A. Steiger Award for excellence in teaching from the UW-Madison in 1996. He currently serves as a member of the BBBP-6 study section of the NIH.
Albee Messing is coordinator of the Waisman Center’s Molecular and Genetic Sciences Unit and faculty coordinator of the Animal Care Core. A professor of pathology at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Messing joined the Waisman Center in 1998. He received a B.S. in biology at Yale University in 1974, a V.M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, and a Ph.D. in experimental pathology from Penn in 1982. He then spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Neuropathology at Penn’s School of Medicine before joining the UW in 1985. Messing’s research interest is the effects of astrocyte dysfunction on the CNS, with particular efforts on intermediate filaments, ion channels, and the molecular biology of Alexander disease. His laboratory received the Weil Award from the American Association of Neuropathologists in 1989, and the Moore Award from the same association in 2000.