Anna Marie (Ann) Skalka (née Sturn) is an American virologist, molecular biologist and geneticist who is professor emeritus and senior advisor to the president at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. She is a co-author of a textbook on virology, ''Principles of Virology''.

Early life and education

She was born in around 1938 in the

Williamsburg Williamsburg may refer to: Places *Colonial Williamsburg, a living-history museum and private foundation in Virginia *Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood in New York City *Williamsburg, former name of Kernville (former town), California *Williams ...

neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, the first child of immigrants Edward Heinrich Sturn and Arcelia (Celia) Del Valle. She attended Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, Queens. Both parents worked at the nearby Pfizer production plant, and she also took a summer laboratory job at the plant. She won a scholarship that enabled her to attend Adelphi University, where she majored in biology, graduating in 1959. Initially influenced by the herpetologist Bayard Brattstrom, with whom she co-authored her first two research papers on the salamander '' Eurycea bislineata'', she subsequently became interested in the then-novel disciplines of molecular biology and molecular genetics. She briefly studied under geneticist David Bonner at the Yale School of Medicine's Department of Microbiology, with a National Science Foundation fellowship. In 1960, she transferred to the microbiology department of New York University (NYU) Medical School, supervised initially by the bacterial geneticist Werner Maas and then by the biochemist

Jerard Hurwitz Jerard Hurwitz (November 20, 1928 – January 24, 2019) was an American biochemist who co-discovered RNA polymerase in 1960 along with Sam Weiss, Audrey Stevens, and James Bonner. He most recently worked at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New Yo ...

, who was researching nucleic acids. She received her Ph.D. from NYU in 1964; her thesis was on histones.

Career and research

Skalka joined the Phage group at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1964 to carry out postdoctoral work on the DNA

bacteriophage A bacteriophage (), also known informally as a ''phage'' (), is a duplodnaviria virus that infects and replicates within bacteria and archaea. The term was derived from "bacteria" and the Greek φαγεῖν ('), meaning "to devour". Bacteri ...

lambda in the laboratory of the Nobel laureate geneticist and bacteriologist,

Alfred Hershey Alfred Day Hershey (December 4, 1908 – May 22, 1997) was an American Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist and geneticist. He was born in Owosso, Michigan and received his B.S. in chemistry at Michigan State University in 1930 and his Ph.D. ...

. She researched transcriptional regulation in phage lambda with Phyllis Bear and others, as well as DNA genome replication in the phage with Mervyn G. Smith and others. In 1968, after Hershey retired and the unit closed, Skalka joined the newly founded Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, at

Nutley, New Jersey Nutley is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, the township's population was 30,143. What is now Nutley was originally incorporated as Franklin Township by an act of the New Jersey Legisla ...

, where she remained until 1987. At first she continued her work on the replication of phage lambda with

Lynn W. Enquist Lynn W. Enquist is professor emeritus in molecular biology at Princeton University, as well as founding editor of the journal ''Annual Review of Virology''. His research focuses on neuroinvasive alpha- herpesviruses. Education Enquist received a ...

, Paul Bartl, Jose Sogo and others. In the mid-1970s, she switched her research focus to

retroviruses A retrovirus is a type of virus that inserts a DNA copy of its RNA genome into the DNA of a host cell that it invades, thus changing the genome of that cell. Once inside the host cell's cytoplasm, the virus uses its own reverse transcriptase e ...

, after a sabbatical studying with

Hidesaburo Hanafusa was a Japanese virologist. He shared the 1982 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Harold E. Varmus and J. Michael Bishop for demonstrating how RNA tumor viruses cause cancer, and elucidating their role in combining, rescuing and ...

. Her initial focus used the avian sarcoma leukosis viruses (ASV) of chickens as a model system. With Bill McClements and others, she cloned ribosomal RNA genes of the chicken host. In the early 1980s, Skalka's laboratory cloned unintegrated ASV and studied transcriptional regulatory elements in the viral long terminal repeats (LTRs). With collaborator Susan Astrin at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, the laboratory cloned part of the avian endogenous provirus ''ev-1'' as well as its integration site; the results suggested similarities between retroviruses and transposable elements. Skalka later joined the Fox Chase Cancer Center, where she continued to study the molecular aspects of retroviral replication. She held the W. W. Smith Chair in Cancer Research and also served as senior vice president for basic science and director of the Institute for Cancer Research at the Fox Chase. Skalka has authored 240 research publications and edited a number of books in addition to authoring or co-authoring two books.

Awards

She was awarded Sigma Xi's 2018 William Procter Prize, a scientific research award endowed in the name of a former Sigma Xi member William Cooper Procter, the grandson and heir of one of the founders of the Procter and Gamble Company. The citation is for "her contributions to our understanding of the biochemical mechanisms by which retroviruses (including the AIDS virus) replicate and insert their genetic material into the host genome." She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994.

Personal life

In 1960 she married Rudolph (Rudy) Skalka. They have two children, a daughter and a son.

References

External links

Fox Chase Cancer Center bio
{{DEFAULTSORT:Skalka, Anna Marie Living people Year of birth missing (living people) People from Williamsburg, Brooklyn American microbiologists American molecular biologists American geneticists American women biologists Adelphi University alumni New York University alumni American virologists American science writers American medical researchers 21st-century American women Fox Chase Cancer Center people