Wilma Olson

Wilma Olson (born around 1945) is a polymer chemist by training who holds the Mary I. Bunting professorship at the Rutgers Center for Quantitative Biology at Rutgers University. Her research group studies how the chemical architecture of DNA affects its conformation, properties and interactions, treating DNA as a polymer, including how it binds structural proteins such as histones and the energy needed to form circular DNA. She took a chemistry degree at the University of Delaware in 1967 and a doctorate at Stanford University in 1971 under Paul Flory, who won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, then held a Damon Runyon fellowship with Charles Cantor at Columbia University. She became assistant professor at Rutgers in 1972 and full professor in 1979, and helped set up the Nucleic Acid Database with Helen Berman.