Author Archives: Suw

ALD22: Professor Hailan Hu, Neuroscientist

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Hailan Hu

Professor Hailan Hu

Hailan Hu, 胡海岚, is a neuroscientist who studies the neurological mechanisms behind emotional and social experiences and how they change the brain’s neural circuitry. Her work is opening up new approaches to treating mental illness.

Born in China in 1973, Hu received her BSc in biochemistry and molecular biology from Peking University in Beijing in 1996. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. She worked across the US until returning to China in 2008 to set up her own lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai.

In 2011, her team showed that the social rank of mice is encoded in neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex, with neurological differences between higher and lower ranked mice. Changing the strength of the connections between neurons resulted in the mice’s social status changing.

In 2016, Hu and her team discovered that a set of neural circuits called the lateral habenula become hyperactive in depressed rats. Ketamine, a fast-acting antidepressant, alleviated the rats’ symptoms by reducing that neuronal hyperactivity.

Increasing our understanding of the neurobiology of mental health disorders opens up new avenues for therapeutics. In an interview, Hu said, “we discovered how the anaesthetic ketamine blocks electrical bursts from a region of the brain and relieves the symptoms of severe depression. We’re talking to scientists and clinicians worldwide about translating the research into antidepressants.”

Hu’s lab has formal collaborations with a number of research groups, including at the University of California, Los Angeles, Columbia University in New York City and the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Hu won the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science award in 2015 and 2022, as well as many other prizes and awards.

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ALD22: Dr Firdausi Qadri, Immunologist

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Dr Firdausi Qadri

Firdausi Qadri is a Bangladeshi immunologist and infectious disease researcher. She developed an affordable oral cholera vaccine and the typhoid conjugate vaccine. She gained her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and her master’s degree in molecular biology at the University of Dhaka before moving to the UK to earn her doctorate from the University of Liverpool in 1980. Although she had the opportunity to stay in the UK, she felt she needed to return to Bangladesh.

She began working at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDE,B) in 1988, starting her research on shigella, which causes dysentery, accidentally getting infected with Shigella dysenteriae herself.

She later refocused on cholera and typhoid, using biochemical, immunological and molecular approaches to understand the bacteria that cause these diseases and develop rapid diagnostic tools.

Qadri carried out a major trial with 240,000 people to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of a large-scale oral cholera vaccine. In 2017, when Rohingya refugees from Myanmar arrived in Dhaka, their camps were in areas with some of the highest rates of cholera in the city. She led a team of experts during a mass vaccination program which prevented a cholera outbreak, and was part of the vaccination of 1.2 million high-risk people in Dhaka.

In 2012, Qadri was awarded the Christophe Rodolfe Grand Prize. She used the prize money to found the Institute for Developing Science and Health Initiatives, which launched in 2014 and focuses on genetic disorders such as Down Syndrome, Huntington’s disease, and congenital hypothyroidism.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, Qadri was one of the key scientists coordinating a response to the new virus.

In 2020, she received the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Award for Asia-Pacific “in recognition of her outstanding work to understand and prevent infectious diseases affecting children in developing countries, and promote early diagnosis and vaccination with global health impact”.

In 2021, Qadri was awarded the Raman Magsaysay Award for “her passion and lifelong devotion to the scientific profession; her vision of building the human and physical infrastructure that will benefit the coming generation of Bangladeshi scientists, women scientists in particular; and her untiring contributions to vaccine development, advanced biotechnological therapeutics and critical research that has been saving millions of precious lives.”

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ALD22: Professor Janaki Ammal, Botanist and Cytologist

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Janaki Ammal

Prof Janaki Ammal

Prof Janaki Ammal was born in 1897 in Kerala, India. She completed her undergraduate study at Queen Mary’s College, Chennai, and an honours degree from Presidency College before going to the USA to earn her master’s degree in botany in 1926, and a few years later her doctorate, from the University of Michigan.

After spending two years as a professor at the Maharaja’s College of Science in Trivandrum, she joined the Sugarcane Breeding Institute in Coimbatore. Her research focused on improving native Indian sugarcane species, which was not as sweet as the Saccharum officinarum plants the country was importing from Java. By cross-breeding dozens of plants to create hybrids in her laboratory, she developed a strain that yielded more sucrose and would grow well in tropical Indian conditions.

Unfortunately, as a single woman from a caste considered low, Ammal faced prejudice from her male colleagues, and she returned to the UK in 1940. She worked with Cyril Dean Darlington at the John Innes Institute and, over the course of five years, they wrote the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, which records the chromosome number of around 100,000 plants and which is still a core text for modern plant scientists.

In 1946, Ammal joined the Royal Horticultural Society in Wisley as a cytologist, studying the structure and function of cells, and their first salaried female staff member. There, she studied the chromosomes of a wide number of garden plant species to better understand their evolution and varieties. She was particularly interested in magnolia, and several of her shrubs still survive at Wisley today.

She treated some magnolia seeds with a solution of colchicine, a drug usually used to treat gout, which resulted in the seedlings doubling the number of their chromosomes. The seedlings grew faster, showed variations in their leaf texture and developed longer-lasting flowers. One of her varieties, which has white petals and purple stamens, is named Magnolia kobus ‘Janaki Ammal’.

After World War II, she returned to India to become the first director of the Central Botanical Laboratory at Allahabad and manage the Botanical Survey of India, which had been established in 1890 to collect and catalogue India’s flora.

India had suffered some widespread famines in the 1940 during which millions died, and the Indian government was deforesting vast swathes of land, much to Ammal’s distress. She became much more active in working to protect India’s flora, in particular trying to ensure that Indian scientists had access to specimens collected from their own country. She was also instrumental in stopping a hydroelectric dam that would have flooded the botanically diverse Silent Valley. She headed a chromosomal survey of the Valley’s plants, and eventually the government shelved the project.

The Indian government awarded her the Padma Shri, the country’s fourth-highest civilian award, in 1977. In 1999, two awards were named after her: The EK Janaki Ammal National Award on Plant Taxonomy and EK Janaki Ammal National Award on Animal Taxonomy. And in 2019, a rose was named after her.

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ALD22: Professor Fumiko Yonezawa, Theoretical Physicist

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Fumiko Yonezawa

Professor Fumiko Yonezawa

Born in 1938, Fumiko Yonezawa, 米沢 富美子, was a theoretical physicist who studied amorphous materials, semiconductors and liquid metals.

Her career began when she studied amorphous materials, or glasses, as part of her doctorate at Kyoto University in the mid-1960s. She developed the Coherent Potential Approximation (CPA), a method for calculating physical characteristics, such as density or resistivity, of amorphous materials.

Later, at Keio University, Yonezawa and her team studied how, at an atomic level, liquids become crystals or amorphous solids, using computational models. She spent some time at City College of New York, returning to Japan in 1981. In the 1990s, she developed a “theory of metal-insulator transition in liquid selenium” and became interested in neural networks.

In 1984, she was awarded the Saruhashi Prize, which is awarded to Japanese women for research in the natural sciences, for her “Theory of Fundamental Physical Properties of Amorphous Materials”. She was the first woman to become President of the Physics Society of Japan in 1996 and, in 2005, she won a L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science for “pioneering theory and computer simulations on amorphous semiconductors and liquid metals.”

In 2020, the Physical Society of Japan launched the Fumiko Yonezawa Memorial Award to “honor and encourage” female members of the society, presenting awards to five women in physics in Japan.

Fumiko Yonezawa died on 17 January 2019, aged 80.

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ALD22: Professor Jewel Plummer Cobb, Cell Biologist and Cancer Researcher

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Jewel Plummer Cobb

Professor Jewel Plummer Cobb

Jewel Plummer Cobb was a biologist who discovered how skin cells produce melanin and how they become cancerous. She also discovered that methotrexate was an effective treatment for some skin and lung cancers and childhood leukaemia.

Born in 1924 in Chicago, Cobb graduated from Talladega College in Alabama with a degree in biology in 1944, earning her master’s and then her doctorate in cell physiology from New York University. Her research focused on understanding how skin cells produce melanin and how those cells become cancerous. Her doctoral thesis, Mechanisms of Pigment Formation, examined the enzyme tyrosinase, which is required for skin cells to produce melanin, which is what causes colour in human skin.

After finishing her PhD, she spent two years at the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Center where she developed a deep understanding of how to culture human tissue directly from a sample taken from a person. Few people understood these techniques in the 1950s. She became skilled at culturing cancer cells taken from patient biopsies and used these cultures to study the effect of various chemotherapy drugs on the cells’ morphology, migration and growth.

In 1952, she started her own laboratory which was the first tissue culture-based lab at the University of Illinois Medical School. She combined her early research on skin pigmentation and melanin with her newer work on cancer.

Two years later, she moved her lab back to Harlem, and began working with Jane Wright to study the effect that chemotherapy drugs had on melanoma, a type of skin cancer. Wright worked with the patients, and Cobb worked with cells cultured from the patients’ samples. They realised that Cobb’s results could help predict which treatments would work for each patient and type of cancer. Cobb used non-cancerous tissue samples as controls, something which wasn’t common practice at the time because it was so hard to culture non-cancerous cells.

In the early 1960s, Cobb and Wright showed that methotrexate was effective for treating several cancers, including skin and lung cancer, and childhood leukaemia. Cobb also worked with mice that had been bred to be more susceptible to skin cancer, and discovered that cells with more melanin were protected from damage caused by exposure to radium and X-rays. This was the first evidence that melanin protects cells from UVA/UVB light.

In 1969, Cobb became the first black dean at Connecticut College, where she began programs to encourage women and people of colour to study STEM and explore STEM careers. She later became the first black woman to be appointed to the National Science Board, which supervises the National Science Foundation.

Cobb died in 2017, aged 92.

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