I was inspired by Clarra's recent posts about women in science to write about another female scientist. Shirley M. Tilghman is a professor of molecular biology and was the former president of Princeton University. She was just the second woman to lead an Ivy League institution. She has multiple awards, including the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science, and many others. She is a member of many groups, such as The National Academy of Sciences, The Institute of Medicine, and is a director of Google Inc. The list of her achievements goes on and on.
During Tilghman's postdoc at the National Institute of Health, she was apart of cloning the first mammalian gene. She later focused on gene expression and embryonic growth regulation. With this research she discovered the mechanisms that allow parental-specific expression of a select group of over 30 imprinted genes and how they regulate the growth patterns in the embryo and fetus. Her focus on gene expression led her to be a founding member of the National Institute of Health's National Advisory Council of the Human Genome Project.
Overall, Tilghman contributed greatly to the field of molecular biology and it is pretty dang cool to read about awesome ladies in the field of science!
To read more about her, here are some of the websites I looked at:
https://www.princeton.edu/president/tilghman/biography/
http://www.sdbonline.org/sites/Tilghman-bio.pdf
This is awesome! I love reading about an intelligent woman who has made a difference in this field. She is a very fascinating woman who has achieved many amazing things. It's women like this that inspire me to work in the science field.
ReplyDeleteI'm really glad my posts inspired you to learn more about awesome lady scientists! Keep it up because I've never heard of Shirley. There's still so many more women in science fields, and I'm excited to learn more about them. Do you happen to know what mammalian gene she used to clone?
ReplyDeleteAll of you keep it coming...in your class of 19 students, there are only five men. Women are coming up in a big way, and I predict that the next scientific revolution will be because of you.
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