Barnard Chemistry (Newsletter

Molly Weiner '07 continued her research in Prof. Martin Chalfie’s lab in the Columbia Biology department this year. She will attend Yale School of Medicine this fall, where she has been awarded full financial support.

Chantel Nicolas '07 wrote “I recently landed an Associate Chemist position in a cosmetic R&D laboratory and am interested in taking some courses in the field. I am applying to Fairleigh Dickinson University for an M.S. in Chemistry, with a Cosmetic Science concentration.... I really enjoy what I do.”

Yardana Kaufman '07 will start medical school at Einstein in the fall, her first choice. Yardana has been working in the Columbia labs of Profs. Koji Nakanishi and Ilyas Washington on the synthesis of Vitamin A analogs. This research is related to age-related vision loss.

Seen at the Boston ACS meeting last August: Diane Zhang '06 and Montana Childress '06, both graduate students at MIT. Their graduate study is going well; both presented papers.

Teresa Wojtasiewicz '07 is thrilled to be starting medical school at Columbia this fall.

Marina Khrapunovich '06 is finishing her second year of the M.D./Ph.D. program at Einstein. She works on the mechanism of microtubule stabilization by new natural products in the lab of Prof. Susan Horwitz.

Yevgeniya Monisova '06 will start in the combined Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh computational biology Ph.D. program this fall.

Kim Sogi '06 is finishing her second year at UC Berkeley, working in Carolyn Bertozzi’s group. She reports that her project on sulfotransferases in tuberculosis is really interesting. She is learning genetics, structural biology, and biochemistry, but still does some organic synthesis.

Pam Cole '05, who plans a career in sports nutrition, is studying for an M.S. in applied physiology and nutrition at Teachers College. She is very enthusiastic about the program. She and her husband are martial arts enthusiasts. In February, Pam came to a Career Services event to tell students about her interests and studies. Thanks Pam, it is great for students to hear about diverse opportunities.

Diana Huang '05 is finishing her third year of medical school at SUNY-Buffalo.

Bridget Marcellino '05 is finishing her second year in the M.D./Ph.D. program at Mt. Sinai. She loves it. She looks forward to getting back into the lab after preparing for Boards in June. Bridget still competes internationally in Irish dancing.

Lillian Seu '05 continues in the Ph.D. program in pharmacology at UCSF in Prof. Joseph McCune’s group. She is investigating host immune responses determining the outcome of HIV pathogenesis, and loves living in San Francisco.

Karen Chang '04 has just completed her M.D. at SUNY-Buffalo and soon begins a surgical residency at Stony Brook.

Louisa Morrison '04 wrote last summer: “I'm at Vanderbilt University in the Biochemistry Department and the Center for Molecular Toxicology. I am working with Dr. Fred Guengerich, a distinguished toxicologist. My research project is on the kinetics and mechanism of alkyl guanine transferase, an enzyme involved in genomic integrity. Nashville is a great place!”

Sister Francesca (Alexis) Sabo '03 was invested as a Franciscan Sister of the Renewal in September 2007. Dina Merrer, Toby Holtz, and Esther Francisco '03 attended the beautiful ceremony in the Bronx. Sr. Francesca resides in and serves the East Harlem community.

Abby Smenton '03 is studying for her M.P.H. at the Mailman School of Public Health (Columbia), in the department of Sociomedical Sciences with a concentration in Gerontology. Busy planning for a June wedding, she took the time to help her Barnard class prepare for their 5th reunion.

Ekaterina Zelenova '03 is studying chromosome dynamics during meiosis in the nematode C. elegans in Prof. Abby Dernburg’s molecular and cell biology laboratory at UC Berkeley.

Elnaz Menhaji '02, finishing her PhD at Yale, plans to do a postdoc in Tristan Lambert’s lab at Columbia. Last summer she told us that she was engaged to her boyfriend of three years, whom she met at Yale. He was looking for NY academic jobs in Egyptology and Ancient Civilizations.

Lisa (Perlson) Silverman '02 will begin Stanford Law School in the fall. She finished her Ph.D. in chemistry at Stanford in early May. Her thesis was "Stark Spectroscopy as a Probe of Charge Reorganization in Chemical and Biological Systems." Before she starts law school, Lisa and her husband, Adam, will take a much needed vacation in Belize.

After a postdoctoral year in Oxford, Sarah Tully '00, returned to California in October to do postdoctoral research in Ben Cravatt’s lab at Scripps. This was one of the labs she considered when first applying to grad school, so she is thrilled to be going there.

Classes of the 1990's

Moushumi Paul '99 came back to Barnard this fall to tell students about her career as a Ph.D. chemist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (in Wyndmoor PA). Thanks, Moushumi.

Fay Xing '99 received her M.B.A. from Harvard in June 2007. Armed with both M.D. and M.B.A., she is joining a biomedical company in Minneapolis. Fay began her entrepreneurial involvement with medicine while in medical school.

Headshot of Ayo Green Ayodele Green '97 is a psychiatry resident at Harlem Hospital. She is active in a number of causes. In an article “Why a Physician's Union?” she began "Medicine has interested me since I was a little girl, and being a woman, I learned the power of independence and of having a voice of your own.” Seeing daily the challenges faced by her patients, she works in the “Save Our Safety Net” campaign of the Service Employees International Union and in Physicians for a National Health Program. Ayodele’s M.D. is from Temple.

Aliya Hasan '94 became Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center in July 2007. She received her M.D. from NYU, and surgical training at Montefiore in NY, Cedars-Sinai in LA, and U. of Colorado Health Sciences Center, in Denver. Her website (http://www.aliyahasan.com/) promotes “Women's Only Colonoscopy.”

Brooke Gurland '90, a colorectal surgeon, has been at the Cleveland Clinic since 2007. She is an expert on women’s pelvic floor dysfunction. She received her M.D. from Hahnemann, then did a residency at Mt. Sinai and a fellowship at Cleveland Clinic.

Lisa Spiryda '90 has been Assistant Professor in the division of Gynecology at the University of South Carolina since 2007. Her clinical interests include HPV and abnormal PAP tests, minimally invasive surgical techniques, adolescent gynecology, and family-oriented obstetrics. Lisa has an M.D. and Ph.D. from Mt. Sinai.

Classes before 1990

Orit Saigh '89 is in the division of General Internal Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, and practices at the Beth Israel Medical Center, Phillips Ambulatory Care Center on Union Square.

Larysa Pevny '87, Assistant Professor in the department of Genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies the nervous system and its stem cells. Since there are very few stem cells in the nervous system, their study is extremely difficult. Her lab uses a green fluorescent protein to illuminate neural stems cells in lab mice.

Jessie Jean-Claude '85, a vascular surgeon, is Associate Chief of Surgery at the Cleveland Ohio Veterans’ Association Medical Center. Jessie received her M.D. from Columbia in 1989, and trained at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, UCSF, and Malmo (Sweden). She has been at Case-Western and the Cleveland VA since 2001.

Jean Greenberg '83 is Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago. From her web page, with some edits: “My broad interest is in how organisms adapt to a changing environment. I study this in the context of host-pathogen interactions using the model system of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the gram negative pathogen Pseudomonas syringae. We discovered that infection also activates cell growth and the cell cycle. We study how Arabidopsis regulates its defense and cell death response to pathogens using mutants.”

Caroline Apovian '80 has been in the news, due to her book on a new over-the-counter weight loss product, The Alli Diet Plan. Caroline is Director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston University Medical Center. She is also Director of Clinical Research at the Obesity Research Center of BU Medical Center, and Associate Professor of Medicine at BU School of Medicine. Caroline received her M.D. from UMDNJ in 1985.

We enjoyed a brief visit with Beth Gross '80 at Barnard’s graduation this spring. Her daughter Pnina Herskovits '08, a psychology major, will be attending Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Fall. Beth is a radiologist is a small ob-gyn group practice in Queens.

It was fun to see Jenny Stone '78 at her Barnard 30th reunion. A dermatological surgeon, Jenny recently relocated from Hawaii to the Charlotte NC area.

Adele Weitzmann Marcus '73 wrote last spring: “I've been living in Haifa, Israel for almost eleven years now. My daughter is beginning a masters in biology and my son will be starting a bachelors at Hebrew U. this fall studying physics and math. My husband works for IBM research. I am a practicing U.S. patent agent and Israeli patent attorney. I write applications for inventors and work vis-à-vis the patent offices. Much of my practice deals with computer applications and business methods.”

Helen Berman '64 has been named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer for the 2008-09 year. One of her lectures is “How the History of the Protein Data Bank Informs the Future of Biology.”

Gertrude Neumark Rothschild '48, Professor Emerita of Engineering at Columbia, was awarded one of two Distinguished Alumna Awards at Barnard’s 2008 reunion. She was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree at Columbia’s graduation. As reported in Nature News (5/9/08), she recently filed a copyright infringement complaint against a number of large corporations in support of her patent for making blue and ultraviolet light-emitting diodes and short-wavelength laser diodes. She says that she does this in part to raise awareness of women's role in science, observing “people don't pay too much attention unless there's a financial impact.”

Dr. Vera Joseph Peterson '32 died in January at the age of 98. Born in Jamaica, Dr. Joseph, as she was known to her patients, was among the first African-American graduates of both Barnard (φβκ) and the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. She and her husband practiced medicine in Puerto Rico, NYC, Beirut, and Geneva, before settling in Amherst MA in 1964. There she joined the Smith College Health Service, retiring as its Director in 1975.

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