| Iva Susan Greenwald | |
| Workplaces: | MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Princeton University Columbia University |
| Alma Mater: | MIT |
| Thesis Title: | Genetic studies of muscle structure and cell lineage in Caenorhabditis elegans |
| Thesis Url: | http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/10718565 |
| Thesis Year: | 1982 |
Iva Susan Greenwald is an American biologist who is Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at Columbia University. She studies cell-cell interactions and cell fate specification in C. elegans. She is particularly interested in LIN-12/Notch proteins, which is the receptor of one of the major signalling systems that determines the fate of cells.
Greenwald joined MIT as a graduate student in 1977.[1] She was trained in the classics of molecular biology and developmental genetics. That year, H. Robert Horvitz joined the faculty at MIT, and convinced her to investigate C. elegans. She started working on genetics, functional redundancy cell-lineage mutants.[2] She moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1983 where she worked alongside Jonathan Hodgkin, Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros, who encouraged her to try to clone LIN-12. It took her two years to develop a strategy to clone LIN-12 (Tc1 transposon tagging), and she identified that that genetic sequence contained epidermal growth factor (EGF) motifs.[3] These investigations were amongst the first to show that worm developmental genes could be cloned, and that aspects of these genes were homologous to human proteins.
In 1986, Greenwald joined the faculty at Princeton University. She moved to Columbia University in 1993, and was made professor two years later.[4] Greenwald dedicated her career to understanding the mechanisms that underpin the LIN-12/Notch signalling system.[4] LIN-12/Notch proteins mediate cell-cell interactions. Amongst these processes, Greenwald studies the role of LIN-12/Notich in binary regulation, feedback mechanisms and signal transduction. She has identified new genes that are involved with the modulation of LIN-12/Notch in development and disease.
Greenwald is married to Gary Struhl, with whom she has a daughter.