Zena Werb
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Zena Werb | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 24, 1945 |
| Died | 16 June 2020 (aged 75) San Francisco, California, United States |
| Education | |
| Known for | Study of the extracellular matrix |
| Awards | E.B. Wilson Medal, 2007 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Cell biology |
| Institutions | University of California, San Francisco |
| Thesis | Dynamics of macrophage membrane cholesterol (1971) |
| Doctoral advisor | Zanvil Cohn |
| Website | werblab |
Zena Werb (24 March 1945 – 16 June 2020) was a professor and the Vice Chair of Anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. She was also the co-leader of the Cancer, Immunity, and Microenvironment Program at the Hellen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and a member of the Executive Committee of the Sabre-Sandler Asthma Basic Research Center at UCSF.[1][2] Her research focused on features of the microenvironment surrounding cells, with particular interest in the extracellular matrix and the role of its protease enzymes in cell signaling.[3][4]
Zena Werb was born in Germany in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (KZ Bergen-Belsen), a few weeks before the camp was liberated. Both of her parents, who were Polish-Jewish, survived the war, with her father having fled to Italy. Her family was able to reunite at a refugee camp in Italy in 1947;[5] they emigrated to Canada in 1948, where Werb was raised on a farm in Ontario.[6][7] Though her father was previously a mathematician, he became a farmer.[5]
Werb received her B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Toronto in 1966, having changed her major from geophysics after being told there were no accommodations for women at a field site.[6][8] She received her Ph.D. in Cell Biology from Rockefeller University in 1971, working under the supervision of Zanvil Cohn on a thesis titled "Dynamics of macrophage membrane cholesterol".[9] After graduation she worked at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, United Kingdom as a postdoctoral fellow with John T. Dingle from 1971 to 1973 and as a research associate from 1973 to 1975.[2][7][10]
Academic career
Werb spent a year as a visiting assistant professor at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire before moving to the University of California, San Francisco in 1976, where she became a full professor in 1983.[2][7][10] She served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology in 2004.[11] She spoke of the value of academic sabbaticals, and in 2007 she spent a sabbatical at the Max Planck Institute through an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award.[12][13]
Werb wrote and gave interviews on her experiences as a woman in science, describing the environment in which she trained as sexist and noting that, despite improvements in women's representation in the sciences since her training, sexism "has gone underground"[6] and low representation of women in top positions remains a problem.[14][15]
She was a member of the Editorial Board for Developmental Cell.
Awards and honors
- FASEB Excellence in Science Award from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (1966) [13]
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1985-6) [7]
- American Association for Cancer Research Women in Cancer Research Charlotte Friend Memorial Lectureship (2001) [16]
- UCSF Annual Faculty Research Lectureship (2001) [17]
- Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003) [13]
- E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology (2007) [18]
- Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Cell Biology, an ASCB subgroup (2010) [19]
- Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (2010) [13]
- UCSF Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award (2015) [20]
