Rest in Peace, Dr. Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Laureate

As I was growing up in Yonkers, New York, I read The New York Times at every opportunity.

While I was a student at Yonkers High School and in college at Brown University, I would periodically come across articles on the amazing scientist, Dr. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, who had been born in NYC. She passed away on May 30, 2011, in NYC at age 89.

Her parents never finished high school, but she went on to graduate magna cum laude from Hunter College and then struggled to get accepted for graduate school. When she applied to a midwestern university (I won't mention the name but you can find it here and times have changed somewhat since I was recruited by the same one a few years back for a tenured faculty position) to further her studies in physics, the university wrote back to her professor: She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman. If you can guarantee her a job afterward, we’ll give her an assistantship. This could not be guaranteed, so she was rejected.

Despite being hurt by this rejection, she got a job as a secretary at Columbia University and with World War II opening up academic opportunities for women, she received a teaching assistantship at the University of Illinois in Urbana in engineering. She was the only female teaching fellow/faculty member out of 400! She received her doctorate in nuclear physics in 1945, moved back to NYC, where her incredible scientific career with discoveries in radioimmunoassay, with her collaborator Dr. Berson, continued.

Many new, creative ideas are met with resistance. According to The Times, scientific journals, at first, rejected her research with Berson on insulin antibodies. She did not forget this experience and included the rejection letter in her Nobel prize lecture. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977, only the second woman at that point to have been awarded this major accolade. Speaking to schoolchildren several years after receiving the Nobel about the challenges of a life as a scientist, she said, Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma, if you're right. And if you're really lucky, you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation.

Although Berson predeceased her, and, hence, could not share the prize with her, she named her lab after him, so that his name would appear on her publications afterwards. Yalow was not only a great scientist but also a great person.

This week, the 2011 World Science Festival (WSF) is taking place in NYC, and I hope to catch a part of it, since it is an amazing set of 50 events over 5 days. One of the themes this year, and Yalow would have been pleased, is Women in Science.

Some highlights of my experiences at the 2009 WSF can be found here.

Chairing the Fellows Selection Committee

Many professional societies recognize their most distinguished scholars through election / selection as a Fellow of the society. To achieve a fellow recognition signifies recognition by one's peers at the highest level of professional achievement.

Having served on the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) Fellows Selection Committee for the past two years, this year I am chairing the committee.

The RSAI website contains the following nomination information:

RSAI members are invited to nominate distinguished scholars for consideration to become 2011 Fellows of RSAI. The nomination process can be initiated by any member of RSAI and consists of a letter of nomination, detailing the scientific merit and contribution of the nominee and an up to date curriculum vitae. Current Fellows are not allowed to submit nominations. To ensure full consideration by the committee, these materials should be provided in electronic format (pdf preferred) by January 31, 2011 to Anna Nagurney, Chair 2011 Fellows Election Committee at: nagurney@gbfin.umass.edu

The above RSAI website link also contains names of all previously elected Fellows. There are presently 58 living Fellows and two deceased ones (Reginald Gollege and Walter Isard, the founder of the field of Regional Science, who passed away last month at the age of 91).

The Nobel laureate Paul Krugman of Princeton University was elected RSAI Fellow last year. David E. Boyce, Professor Emeritus of the University of Illinois, and Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University, is both an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow.

Among the RSAI Fellows are 5 females: Karen R. Polenske of MIT, Ann Markusen of the University of Minnesota, Janice Madden of the University of Pennsylvania, and Aura Reggiani of the University of Bologna, Italy, and yours truly.

The first group of RSAI Fellows was elected in 2002 and consisted of:

• Walter Isard, Cornell University, USA
• Martin Beckmann, Brown University, USA and Technical University of Munich, Germany
• Jean Paelinck, Erasmus University, NETHERLANDS
• David Boyce, Northwestern University, USA.

RSAI has an international membership of over 3,000, more than one third of whom are Europeans. According to its web site, “Founded in 1954, RSAI is an international community of scholars interested in the regional impacts of national or global processes of economic and social change. The work of RSAI draws on the expertise of many different disciplines and this multi-disciplinary approach helps to facilitate new theoretical insights for tackling regional problems. In turn, this provides an increasing opportunity for academics within the Association to engage more fully with planners and policy makers. Building on a strong foundation of quantitative methods, regional science is at the cutting edge of research into new model design for regional analysis and impact assessment. The Association fosters the exchange of ideas and research within regional science through its publications and the international scientific conferences it hosts.”