Shirley M. Tilghman

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Shirley M. Tilghman bigraphy, stories - Biologist and biochemist

Shirley M. Tilghman : biography

17 September 1946 –

Shirley Marie Tilghman, FRS ( née Caldwell; born 17 September 1946) is a Canadian scholar in molecular biology and an academic administrator; she was the 19th President of Princeton University. She was the first woman to hold the position and only the second female president in the Ivy League.Though her selection was announced before President Tilghman’s, Ruth Simmons of Brown University was not sworn in until July 3, 2001, whereas Tilghman took office on June 15, 2001, making Tilghman the second female Ivy League president. The first was Judith Rodin of the University of Pennsylvania A leader in the field of molecular biology, Tilghman was a member of the Princeton faculty for 15 years before being named president.

Key publications

  • Tilghman, Shirley (1999) The Sins of the Fathers and Mothers: Genomic Imprinting in Mammalian Development.
  • Tilghman, Shirley, et al. (1994) The Funding of Young Investigators in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences. ISBN 0-309-05077-4
  • Tilghman, Shirley and National Research Council Committee on Dimensions, Causes, and Implications of Recent Trends in the Careers of Life Scientists (1998) Trends in the Careers of Life Scientists.
  • Tilghman, Shirley (2005) Recruiting, Retaining and Advancing Women Scientists in Academia. .

Early life and family

Tilghman graduated from Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, Manitoba and received her Honours B.Sc. in chemistry from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1968. After two years of secondary school teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she obtained her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania under Richard W. Hanson.

Personal life

She married Joseph Tilghman in 1970. This marriage ended in the early 1980s, leaving Tilghman with custody of their young daughter (Rebecca) and infant son (Alex). She attributes her successful balancing of a scientific career and caring for her family to organization and focus. Her goal was to not feel guilty while at work or at home, instead focusing on the task at hand.

Societies and awards

Tilghman is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the Royal Society of London. She was a founding member of the International Mammalian Genome Society. She serves as a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. From 1993 through 2000, Tilghman chaired Princeton’s Council on Science and Technology, which encourages teaching science and technology to students outside the sciences. In 1996, she received Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Tilghman was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Harvard University in 2004.

Nineteen Princeton graduating classes, from 1941 to 2005, have made President Tilghman an honorary member.

Awards

  • L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science (2002)
  • Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Developmental Biology (2003)
  • Genetics Society of America Medal (2007)
  • Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research (2010)

Research

Tilghman’s work in molecular genetics focused on the regulation of genes during development, particularly in the field of genomic imprinting.

During postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health, Tilghman made a number of discoveries while a member of the team which cloned the first mammalian gene. She went on to demonstrate that the globin gene was spliced, a finding that helped confirm some of the revolutionary theories then emerging about gene behavior. She continued to make scientific breakthroughs as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and as an adjunct associate professor of Human Genetics at University of Pennsylvania.

Tilghman went to Princeton University in 1986 as the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences. Two years later, she also joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as an investigator. She was a leader in the use of mice to understand the behavior of genes by researching the effect of gene insertion in embryonic cells.