Our Trustees

Mary A. Bonneville, Founder and Trustee Emerita

Mary A. Bonneville was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and, after primary and secondary educations in local public schools, she graduated from Smith College in 1953. She worked at Amherst College in the laboratory of Oscar Schotte and received an MA from there in 1955. In that same year she became the only woman in the first class of ten students admitted to the newly formed student program at The Rockefeller University, then called The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. In 1961 she was awarded a Ph.D. for work on structural changes in the intestine of the frog during metamorphosis, as seen by the then new technique of electron microscopy. At Rockefeller, her thesis advisor was Keith Porter, who remained her mentor, supervisor, colleague and friend until his death in 1997. After postdoctoral appointments at Columbia, College of Physicians and Surgeons, at Tufts Medical School and Harvard Medical School in the Departments of Dermatology and two years as Assistant Professor at Brown University, Mary then rejoined Porter and became assistant professor in the newly formed Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, when Porter left Harvard and moved to Colorado in 1970. She remained in that Department and retired as full professor in 1996. Her main research interest was exploring the function, as a permeability barrier, of particles associated with the free surface of the superficial cells lining the mammalian urinary bladder and in learning about their formation in the Golgi and their integration into and removal from the the cell membrane. With Keith Porter, in the mid '60s, she also produced an atlas of cell and tissue structure, which was aimed at helping students of histology understand the then new concepts of cell structure in the various tissues of the body as revealed by electron microscopy. At Colorado she taught cell biology with Porter, microscopic anatomy, physiology, human reproduction, and techniques of electron microscopy. Beginning in the 1980's she conducted a series of TV interviews with Keith Porter, George Palade, and Berta Scharrer, and produced TV biographies of these scientists, each lasting about 35 minutes. In the '90s she became chair of the Committee on Women for the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado and was also chair of the Committee on Women serving the four campuses of the University. These committees were involved in the development of policies on sexual harassment and parental leave for the University. Mary remains active on the latter committee, on the (Boulder) Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Women, and as vice president and president-elect of the the University's Retired Faculty Association.

E-mail: bonnevil@colorado.edu

Lee D. Peachey

Lee D. Peachey recently retired after 35 years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he now is Professor Emeritus of Biology. After an undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics, he received the Ph.D. in Biophysics as a member of the first graduating class from Rockefeller University, where he was Keith Porter's first graduate student. Dr. Peachey's research has focused on the role of the transverse tubular system (T-system) in the activation of contraction in skeletal muscle cells. He has used a combination of structural and physiological approaches in these studies, with theoretical and quantitative structural analyses as key links to elucidate the relationships between structure and function in this system. In his retirement, he expects to continue teaching and collaborative research both at Pennsylvania and in Latin America, where he has presented workshop-type courses for many years. Currently he is teaching cellular neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania and consulting with Leica Microsystems on confocal microscopy. Dr. Peachey was one of the original Trustees of the Keith R. Porter Endowment for Cell Biology, and is Trustee and Treasurer of the Endowment.

E-mail: lpeachey@sas.upenn.edu

Clara Franzini-Armstrong

Clara Franzini-Armstrong was born in Firenze (Italy). In 1960 she obtained a Laurea (doctorate) in Biological Sciences at the University of Pisa, while holding a fellowship in the Scuola Normale Superiore. As a student, she was the first electron microscopist in Pisa. During a subsequent year of further training as a fellow of the Scuola Normale Superiore, she initiated a study of denervation atrophy in muscle, under the advice of Claudio Pellegrino. In 1961-63, she had a postdoctoral appointment with Keith R. Porter at Rockefeller and at the Biological Laboratories of Harvard University, where she identified the opening of transverse tubules in skeletal muscle. She further trained with Richard Podolsky at NIH (1964) and Sir Andrew Huxley in London (1965-66), defining the sites of calcium accumulation in muscle and then extending her interest to the contractile myofibrils. She has held research and faculty positions in the Medical Schools of Duke University, University of Rochester and University of Pennnsylvania. She is currently Professor in the Dept. of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Pennnsylvania. Clara Franzini-Armstrong has continued her involvement in structural studies of skeletal and cardiac muscle. She has defined calcium release units in muscle as the sites for initiation of calcium release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum and has identified the channels responsible for the release. She has further defined the unusual structural relationship that allows two calcium channels to talk to each other during muscle activation. Her interest in contractile material has continued, with studies of the Z and M line structure, and with recent collaborations aimed at capturing the myosin cross bridge in action. Recent interests are the phylogenetic and developmental origins of calcium release units. Clara Franzini-Armstrong is a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA and a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society, London.

E-mail: armstroc@mail.med.upenn.edu

Thoru Pederson

Thoru Pederson received his Ph.D. in biology from Syracuse University in 1968 and was a NIH postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cell Biology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1968 to 1971. He joined the Worcester Foundation as a Staff Scientist in Cell Biology in 1971 and was appointed a Principal Scientist in 1983. He joined the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1997 when the Worcester Foundation merged with it. He has held a Scholar Award from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of America and has served on the N.I.H. Cell Biology Study Section (1975-1979), the N.I.H. Molecular Biology Study Section (1980-1983), the Editorial Board of the Journal of Cell Biology (1978-1983) and as a Sigma Xi National Lecturer (1984-1987). He is chair of the Fellowships Committee of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, a member of the Finance Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology, and Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1988) and the American Academy of Microbiology (1996). In 1999 he received the Wilhelm Bernhard Medal (Prague) for his research in the cell nucleus.

Dr. Pederson and his colleagues are investigating the functional significance of specific protein-RNA interactions in eukaryotic gene expression, with particular emphasis on RNA traffic and processing. They also have been combining in situ RNA detection methods with novel approaches that they have developed for following fluorescent RNA molecules in living mammalian cells. Their current focus is the assembly and intracellular traffic of two ribonucleoprotein machines involved in gene expression: RNase P and the signal recognition particle. They also are studying the transport of various RNAs in the nucleus.

E-mail: thoru.pederson@umassmed.edu

Robert D. Goldman

Robert D. Goldman is the Walter Ranson Professor and Chair of the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology of the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University. His rresearch focuses on the structure and function of cytoskeletal systems, particularly the intermediate filament (IF) system in fibroblasts, epithelial cells, and nerve cells. IFs are composed of large families of proteins that vary in composition from one cell type to another--even among cells in the same tissue. Using a variety of techniques, he and his colleagues have demonstrated that IFs form elaborate networks that course throughout the cytoplasm and establish connections with both the nuclear and cell surfaces. At the nuclear surface, they are linked either directly or indirectly with the nuclear lamins, which are chromatin-associated IF protein family members. At the level of the plasma membrane, IFs are involved as cytoskeletal linkages to the focal adhesion of fibroblasts and the desmosomes and hemidesmosomes of epithelial cells. Throughout the cytoplasm, they have shown that IFs are associated with the other cytoskeletal elements, such as microtubules and microfilaments. Their approach to studying the IF system involves biochemical, morphological, immunological, cell physiological, and molecular techniques. Their hypothesis is that the IF system forms a continuous network linking the nuclear and cell surfaces, functioning in such diverse activities as the establishment and maintenance of cell shape, organelle movements within the cytoplasm, nuclear positioning, nuclear-cytoplasmic interactions, and signal transduction. Since many human diseases have been linked to changes in cytoskeletal IF systems, they are also developing models to study the mechanisms involved in IF alterations in various diseases. One example is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) in which they have been able to induce neurofibrillary tangles to form in single cultured nerve cells. These tangles are similar to those found in ALS neurons. Therefore, they are able to study the effects of neurofilament tangle formation in single cells.

E-mail: r-goldman@northwestern.edu

J. Richard McIntosh

E-mail: richard.mcintosh@colorado.edu

Mary A. Beckerle

Dan Kiehart