Rowena Green Matthews

Rowena Green Matthews is G. Robert Greenberg Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.[2] Her research focuses on the role of organic cofactors as partners of enzymes catalyzing difficult biochemical reactions, especially folic acid and cobalamin (vitamin B12). She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2002),[3] the Institute of Medicine (elected 2004),[4] the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005), the American Philosophical Society (2009) [5] and the American Academy of Microbiology (2002).

Early life and education

Matthews earned her B. A. in Biology, summa cum laude, from Radcliffe College in 1960. As an undergraduate, and for three years thereafter, she worked with George Wald and published a first author paper in which she first described a new intermediate in the bleaching of the visual pigment rhodopsin that temporally coincided with initiation of visual excitation.[6] She then went to graduate school in Biophysics at the University of Michigan, where she did her dissertation research in the laboratory of Vincent Massey. She received her Ph.D. in 1969.

Family

Matthews is the daughter of David E. Green and Doris Cribb Green. Her father was Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1962. She married Larry Stanford Matthews in 1960, and they have two children, Brian and Keith, and two grandchildren, Jennifer and David. Her niece, Tammy Baldwin, is the junior Senator from Wisconsin, elected in 2012.

Career

Matthews did her postdoctoral research with Charles H. Williams, Jr. at the University of Michigan, and in 1978 she joined the faculty at Michigan as an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry. She has remained at Michigan throughout her academic career. She has published more than 100 papers in scientific journals, and trained many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. She is the recipient of the William C. Rose Award of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2000) and the Repligen Corporation Award in Chemistry of Biological Processes of the Division of Biological Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (2001).

She was the Frederick Gowland Hopkins Lecturer at 12th International Conference of Pteridines and Folates.[7] She currently serves on the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,[8] and on the Council of the National Academy of Sciences.[9] She is a member of the American Philosophical Society.[10]

Publications

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, January 26, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.