Photo: Professor Judith Klinman
For women's history month, we are grateful to spotlight Professor of the Graduate School in Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology and a member of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, Dr. Judith Klinman.
Among her many distinctions, Klinman was the first woman faculty member in the physical sciences at UC Berkeley. She was also the first woman chair of the Department of Chemistry serving in that capacity from 2000 to 2003.
She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2002 by former President Barack Obama for her discoveries of fundamental chemical and physical principles underlying enzyme catalysis and her leadership in the community of scientists. Her parents told her when she started that if a woman chose a career in science it was typically as a lab tech. "But I had this underlying curiosity,'' she said. "I was determined to go the whole route.
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