Roberta F. Colman

Roberta Fishman was from New York City, the daughter of William and Esther Fishman of Brooklyn.^[1] As a student at Forest Hills High School in 1955, she received a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Award,^[2] and met president Dwight D. Eisenhower.^[3] Colman earned her bachelor's degree at Radcliffe College in 1959,^[4] and completed doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1962, with Frank Westheimer as her advisor. She held post-doctoral fellowships at the National Institutes of Health and the Washington University School of Medicine.^[5]

In 1966, she joined the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine, where she had carried out postdoctoral research.^[5] From 1967 to 1973, Colman was a professor at Harvard Medical School, beginning as an assistant professor and later being promoted to associate professor.^[5] She joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in 1973, the first female biochemist to hold a faculty position there. She was the Willis F. Harrington Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry,^[6] and director of the Chemistry-Biology Interface Graduate Program.^[5] She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1988.^[7] In 1988, Colman represented the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), when testified at a Senate budget hearing in support of increased funding for the National Science Foundation.^[8]

Colman's research involved "the effects of chemical modifications on enzymes".^[9] She held research grants from the National Science Foundation,^[10] the American Cancer Society^[11] and the National Institutes of Health,^[12][13] and wrote or co-wrote over 260 published scholarly articles.^[14] She served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Protein Expression and Purification, and Protein Science, and was editor-in-chief of Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics from 1984 to 2001. She retired from the University of Delaware in 2009.^[14]

Among her biochemistry graduate students at Delaware was Siddhartha Roy.^[15]

During college, Roberta Fishman married Robert W. Colman, a medical student, who had also won a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Award in the 1950s.^[2] They had two children. Robert Colman became a professor of medicine at Temple University.^[16] Roberta F. Colman died in 2019, in Media, Pennsylvania, aged 81 years.^[14][17]