Joan Ruderman

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Joan Ruderman is the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. She has carried out pioneering work on the mechanisms that regulate progress through the cell-division cycle. More recently, her lab has turned to the study of hormonally active pollutants, with a focus on environmental estrogens, industrial chemicals that can mimic natural estrogens with adverse effects on both wildlife and human health. As a Radcliffe fellow, Ruderman will develop a method suitable for screening large numbers of manufactured chemicals for their ability to mimic estrogen. There is growing concern that exposure to such compounds are contributing to certain types of birth defects, reduced fertility, and increases in estrogen-dependent cancers. Previously identified environmental estrogens show little structural similarity to estrogen, making it impossible to use chemical structure alone to predict which other pollutants may also be estrogenic. To circumvent this problem, Ruderman will create transgenic zebra fish embryos that will serve as biological sensors for environmental estrogens. Ruderman received a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in biology. She completed postdoctoral work at MIT and, in addition to Harvard, has taught at Duke University. She has also carried out research at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Ruderman has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and received the Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Award.