Lila M. Gierasch
University Distinguished Professor, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Department of Chemistry, University of Massachusetts Amherst Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Biological Chemistry PONCE ROS, ACTIONFOTO
In 1970, as a first-year biophysics graduate student at Harvard University, Lila Gierasch rode a bus through Cambridge every day to travel between the medical school and the main campus. On the bus one day she overheard someone say the word “collagen.” Gierasch, now a professor of biochemistry, molecular biology, and chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, had studied collagen as an undergraduate. Her interest piqued, she struck up a conversation on the bus with the woman who had uttered the word: Barbara Brodsky, then a graduate student in Elkan Blout’s laboratory in Harvard’s Department of Biological Chemistry. “I just started chatting with her and she told me about her work on collagen in the Blout lab. She and I have been friends ever ...
