Carolyn Cohen (June 18, 1929 – December 20, 2017)[1] was an American biologist and biophysicist. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early life and education

Carolyn Cohen was born June 18th, 1929 to parents Anna and Philip Cohen.[1][2] After Cohen's father died in 1939, she credited his lawyer Samuel Sumner Goldberg for mentoring her and nurturing her curiosity.[2][3] Cohen attended Joan of Arc Junior High School, then the selective Hunter College High School.[3] After rejections from McGill University and Barnard College, Cohen's French teacher urged her to apply to Bryn Mawr College, where she was accepted with a full-tuition scholarship.[3] In the summer of 1949, Cohen took a job in the kitchen of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA.[4] There she met Shinya Inoué, worked for Otto Schmitt, and attended a lecture by Dorothy Wrinch that she later credited with stimulating her career interest in protein structures.[4] Cohen completed her Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Physics from Bryn Mawr in 1950, graduating summa cum laude.[5] She then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for a PhD under the supervision of Richard S. Bear. There she worked on the structure of collagen and other helically structured proteins, completing her degree in 1954.[4]

While at MIT, Cohen met then-visiting researcher Jean Hanson, who was working on the structure of muscle fibers. After graduation Cohen took a postdoctoral researcher position in Hanson's laboratory at King's College London, working on the X-ray crystallography structure of actin filaments.[4] After nine months, Cohen returned to MIT working first in Bear's lab, then with Andrew Szent-Györgyi on the structure of fibrous proteins. She enrolled in medical school at Boston University, but left after less than a month, returning to full-time research at MIT.[4] In 1957, she began what would become a long collaboration with Donald Caspar, investigating the structure of tropomyosin.[4]

Academic career

In 1958, Cohen started her own laboratory, co-led by Caspar, at the Children's Cancer Research Foundation (now the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute).[4] There she worked primarily on the structure of myosin. With postdoctoral fellow Susan Lowey, Cohen predicted a model for the myosin structure with an alpha-helical core bookended by globular masses. Studying the catch muscle in molluscs, Cohen and Kenneth Holmes (then a postdoctoral researcher with Caspar) demonstrated the presence of alpha-helical coiled coil filaments, published in 1963.[4] A few years later in 1967, Lowey and Henry S. Slater confirmed the predicted globular heads by electron microscopy.[4] From 1969 to 1972, Cohen and Caspar published a series of papers describing the structure of tropomyosin – the first protein structure determined by electron microscopy.[4]

In 1972, Cohen, Caspar, and Lowe – together called the "Structural Biology Laboratory" – moved their laboratory to become the first research group at Brandeis University's Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center.[4]

Cohen retired from Brandeis in 2012.[6]

Awards and honors

References

  1. 1 2 "Carolyn Cohen". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved December 24, 2017.
  2. 1 2 "Carolyn Cohen Obituary". The Boston Globe. January 8, 2018. Retrieved January 4, 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 Cohen, Carolyn (September 16, 2011). "Mrs. Professor". The Journal of Biological Chemistry. 286 (37): 31929–31931. doi:10.1074/jbc.X111.287250. PMC 3173190. PMID 21799004.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Cohen, Carolyn (November 9, 2007). "Seeing and Knowing in Structural Biology". Journal of Biological Chemistry. 282 (45): 32529–32538. doi:10.1074/jbc.X700001200. ISSN 0021-9258. PMID 17848543.
  5. ↑ "Carolyn Cohen | Brandeis University". www.brandeis.edu. Retrieved February 7, 2017.
  6. ↑ "Retiring faculty members honored at luncheon". Retrieved October 25, 2012.
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