Phoenix Bioinformatics

@phoenixbio.bsky.social

Nonprofit dedicated to supporting the long-term preservation and usability of research data and other digital research resources. Home of @tairnews.bsky.social and @morphobank.bsky.social‬

We are deeply saddened to share that Michael Freeling passed away on 7/20/2026 after a year-long battle with cancer. Our deepest condolences go to his family, friends, colleagues, and the many students he inspired. We will share additional memorial information soon.

We are very sorry to share the sad news that Michael Freeling passed away on 7/20/2026 after a year long battle with esophageal cancer.  Mike was a long-time faculty member in the Plant and Microbiology Department at University of California-Berkeley, a groundbreaking plant geneticist, and an inspiring teacher and mentor to over two dozen Ph.D. students, four dozen postdocs, and countless undergraduates. He was best known for pioneering work on maize anaerobic metabolism and gene regulation, transposon biology, developmental genetics of the maize ligule, and the discovery of biased gene retention following whole-genome duplications in plants. Mike was hired by UC-Berkeley as an assistant professor straight out of graduate school in 1973, and he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1979 and to full professor in 1984. He was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1980, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1994, and won the McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies in 2017. Mike taught genetics, comparative genomics and scientific reasoning to our graduate students, and he also taught a popular genetics course for non-majors that had various titles over the years but was affectionately known as “Genetics for Poets.”  Our deepest condolences go out to his family, friends and many colleagues.

🎉Submit your abstract for #MorphoBankConnects, our free virtual conference, coming up in September. Submissions close at the end of the month!

MorphoBank@morphobank.bsky.social · last mo.

Got something to say about #FAIRdata, #openscience, or repositories? Working on something exciting in #MorphoBank? If so, submit your abstract for a 15 minute presentation at #MorphoBankConnects! ⤵️ SUBMIT: bit.ly/4wdeHT8 #evolutionarybiology #biology #archaeology #paleontology #treeoflife