Third Annual Women in Science Symposium Held

Close to 100 representatives from academia, government and industry attended the Third Annual Women in Science Symposium on Friday, November 3, 2000 at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute. This year's theme was "Aging, Science and Society." Keynote presentations were given by Darlene Yee, EdD, San Francisco State University and Margery Silver, EdD, Harvard University.

Dr. Silver discussed the New England Centenarian Study of which she is the Associate Director of. She is also a Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School. She is also the Editor of the Journal of Gerontological Psychiatry. Dr. Silver is the co-author of the best selling book, Living To 100. She has appeared several times on the Oprah Winfrey show to discuss her research on aging. The Centenarian Study is made up of 3 major components: Population genetics, discovering familial patterns relating to extreme longevity; careful annual examinations of centenarians followed by post-mortem autopsies to define what is "normal aging" versus what is disease associated with aging with special emphasis on the aging brain; and molecular genetics, searching for both nuclear and mitochondrial longevity enabling genes among centenarian sibling-pairs, centenarian members of families highly clustered for longevity and random centenarian subjects in comparison to younger controls or controls predisposed to premature mortality.

Dr. Darlene Yee is Director and Professor of Gerontology in the College of Health and Human Services at San Francisco State University where she also serves as Coordinator of Long-Term Care Administration and Director of the Health, Mobility and Safety Laboratory. She has been consultant to the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Science as well as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, NIH Office for Protection from Research Risks, and the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health. Dr. Yee is active in research on the effects of aging on driving, and is committed to advancing women's health through research, education and practice. Her research has been published in numerous journals, book chapters, guides, monographs and technical reports. Dr. Yee serves on several editorial boards and has served on the Board of Directors for the California Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, Consortium for Learning and Research in Aging, National Commission on Health Education Credentialing as well as the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education and San Francisco Senior Center.

This year's honoree was Gisela Witz, Ph.D. After many years of serving as a researcher, a teacher and a mentor Dr. Gisela Witz, retired from the Department of Environmental and Community Medicine at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She served as the Deputy Director and then the Associate Director of the Joint Graduate Program in Toxicology (JGPT) and was an active member of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute. As a leader and lecturer in the JGPT, she affected the lives of numerous students either through teaching, mentorship, or just serving as a concerned "friend." She was a superb mentor of JGPTstudents - many of whom have gone on to great success in industry and government. Dr. Witz conducted seminal research on the metabolism of benzene to hematotoxic, ring-opened products including reactive aldehydes and their cellular mechanisms of toxicity; the role of DNA-protein crosslinks in benzene hematotoxicity; and the biomarkers of benzene exposure including urinary muconic acid and muconaldehyde-protein adducts. She participated in the initial research that suggested that free radicals and active oxygen species might be involved in tumor promotion. Dr. Witz is a true role model for young women scientists.

Left to right: Darlene Yee, Judith Zelikoff, Jeffrey Laskin, Gisela Witz (this year's woman in science honoree), Margery Silver, and Joanna Burger.