Blanche Capel, PhD, has been selected to receive the Carl G. Hartman Award from the Society for the Study of Reproduction for outstanding contributions to the scientific discipline of reproductive biology.
Capel, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Cell Biology, is a leader in the field of vertebrate sex determination. She pioneered the bipotential gonad as a model for studying cell fate commitment and organogenesis. She discovered that in mammals, development of a testis or ovary from the bipotential gonad is initiated by a gene on the Y-chromosome, SRY. However, in the red-eared slider turtle, it is initiated by the incubation temperature of the eggs. Her lab showed that, in both mammals and reptiles, a single epigenetic regulator activates the most upstream gene.
She will be officially honored at the society’s 59th Annual Meeting in Indianapolis in July 2026.