Alma mater University of Tübingen | ||
Institutions New York University School of Medicine Doctoral advisor Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Notable awards National Academy of Sciences, 2005
Conklin Medal, 2011 Academic advisor Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Fields Developmental biology, Cell biology Institution New York University School of Medicine Similar Christiane Nüsslein‑Volhard, Eric F Wieschaus, Edward B Lewis | ||
Ruth Lehmann is a developmental and cell biologist at the New York University School of Medicine, where she is the Director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology, and the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology. Her research focuses on germ cells and embryogenesis.
Contents
Education
As an undergraduate at the University of Tübingen, Lehmann visited the United States from Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1977, originally to study ecology; during her visit she became more interested in genetics and worked with Gerold Schubiger in the then-emerging field of fruit fly genetics. During the fellowship, she attended a meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology at which she met her future PhD advisor; she later credited this encounter with shaping her future scientific career. Lehmann received her Diplom from the University of Freiburg with José-Antonio Campos-Ortega and her PhD from the University of Tübingen with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, where she studied developmental genetics in fruit flies. She then worked briefly as a postdoctoral fellow at the Medical Research Council.
Academic career
Lehmann began her independent research career in 1988 in the biology department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also joined the Whitehead Institute; she had been recruited for this position while still a graduate student. She later described dissatisfaction with job prospects for women scientists in Germany as a motivating factor in deciding to take a US job. In 1996 she moved to the Skirball Institute at New York University, where she has remained since. Lehmann has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 1990. She served as the president of the Society for Developmental Biology in 2003. Lehmann was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. She was awarded the Conklin Medal in 2011.
Research
Since her graduate work, Lehmann's research has focused on germ cells and their role in embryogenesis, including the study of stem cell pluripotency and cellular differentiation. She is well known for work showing the significance of RNA localization in the cell for the formation of germ cells, in particular for discovering the effects of maternal effect genes oskar and nanos. More recently, her research group has examined the development and maintenance of germline stem cells in adult organisms.