Ruth Hubbard, Austrian-born American biologist, Died at 92

  Reseacher

Ruth Hubbard (née Hoffman) was born on March 3, 1924, and died on September 1, 2016.

She was a professor of biology at Harvard University, where she was the first woman to hold a tenured professorship position in biology.

During 1924, Hubbard was born Ruth Hoffmann in Vienna, Austria and escaped Nazism as a teenager.

Along with her family, she relocated to the Boston area and she became a biologist.

Hubbard graduated from Radcliffe College in 1944, earning an A.B. in biochemical sciences.

Ruth was married to Frank Hubbard from 1942 to 1951.

Whilst she was a research fellow at Harvard in the years after World War II, she worked under George Wald, investigating the biochemistry of retinal and retinol.

Mr. Wald shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1967 for his discoveries about how the eye works.

Ruth received a Ph.D. in biology from Radcliffe in 1950, and in 1952, a Guggenheim fellowship at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In her active research career from the 1940s to the 1960s, Ruth Hubbard made important contributions to the understanding of the biochemistry and photochemistry of vision in vertebrates and invertebrates.

During 1967, she and Wald shared the Paul Karrer Medal for their work in this area.

Ruth Hubbard and Wald got married in 1958.

Herself and Wald became the parents of two children: a son, musician and music historian Elijah Wald, and a daughter, attorney Deborah Wald.

Ruth Hubbard also has two grandchildren.

Ruth Hubbard passed away at 92 years old.