Ruth Lehmann

Ruth Lehmann is a developmental and cell biologist. She is the Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, succeeding David Page. She previously was affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine, where she was 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.

Early life

Lehmann initially became interested in science during her early years at home. Her mother served as a teacher and loved both the arts and literature, while her father worked as an engineer. She developed a particular interest in biology, which was in part fueled by a high school biology teacher who encouraged her to pursue the subject at a university.

Education

Lehmann attended the University of Tübingen in Germany to pursue a major in biology. Despite her love for the subject, she was unhappy with the teaching environment and found the courses tedious. Following strong encouragement from American faculty, she applied for and was granted a Fulbright Fellowship in 1977 to study ecology in the United States. After realizing that she preferred genetics and mathematics to ecology, she connected with Gerold Schubiger, a geneticist studying fruit fly development in Seattle, Washington where she learned classical developmental biology. Following her year-long fellowship, Lehmann attended her first scientific conference, the 1978 Society for Developmental Biology meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. There she met her future mentor and friend Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. As Nüsslein-Volhard was moving to an independent position at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, which was not associated with a graduate program, she referred Lehmann to José Campos-Ortega, a researcher at Freiburg University studying the neurobiology of ''Drosophila'' ''.'' Lehmann worked closely with both Campos-Ortega and Nüsslein-Volhard and returned to Tübingen the following year to earn her Ph.D. with Nüsslein-Volhard, at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, studying the maternal genes affecting embryonic development in fruit flies. Lehmann then accepted a post-doctoral position at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

Academic career

Following her post-doctoral position at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Lehmann returned to the United States to found her own laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She remained at MIT for 8 years, serving as a faculty member at both MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in addition to working as a geneticist and molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Lehmann then moved to the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University in 1996 as the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology. She has since become the director of the Skirball Institute and the Helen L. and Martin S. Kimmel Center for Stem Cell Biology, and has recently been named chair of the Cell Biology Department.

Lehmann has served as president of the Society of Developmental Biology, president of the Harvey Society, and council member of the American Society for Cell Biology

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