Name Elizabeth Theil | ||
Elizabeth C. Theil is an American biochemist who worked on iron biology. She became the first woman to be appointed to a chaired professorship at North Carolina State University, in 1988, and in the same year she also received the Oliver Max Gardner Award of the University of North Carolina.
Theil earned her B.A. from Cornell University in 1957 and her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1962. She joined the NCSU faculty in 1971, and moved to the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in 1998. Since 2004 she has also held an adjoint professorship at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her group discovered that iron directly binds ferritin mRNA to regulate ferritin protein biosynthesis[1], that iron enters ferritin protein though ion channels and pores similar to those in cell membranes, and that ferritin iron abundant in legumes can be absorbed intact, with the potential to ameliorate iron deficiency anemia, a disease identified 500 years ago and impacting 30% of the world’s population in 2015.