Elizabeth F. Neufeld

Elizabeth Fondal Neufeld is a French-American geneticist, born on September 27, 1928, whose research has focused on the genetic basis of metabolic disease in humans. Her Russian Jewish family emigrated from Paris to the United States in 1940 as refugees escaping Nazi persecution, after receiving transit visas from the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes. The family settled in New York, where she attended Hunter College High School and graduated from Queens College in 1948 with a Bachelor of Science. She worked as a research assistant at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, studying blood disorders in mice, and then attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a Ph.D. in 1956 for her work on nucleotides and complex carbohydrates. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and has been awarded the Wolf Prize, the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research and the National Medal of Science in 1994.