PEI Welcomes Visiting Senior Biologist Joan Ruderman
The Princeton Environmental Institute is pleased to welcome Joan Ruderman as Senior Biologist and a lecturer at the Princeton Environmental Institute. She previously served as the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard University Medical School and as the president and director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.
Trained as a developmental biologist, most of Ruderman’s research has focused on the molecular mechanisms that regulate cell division and early development. More recently, she has worked on environmental contaminants that mimic estrogen and can increase the risk of breast cancer and other hormone-dependent cancers. As senior science advisor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, she helped establish a program that covers the crosscutting roles of water in areas such as human health to geopolitical disputes.
Among her national leadership roles, Ruderman has served on the medical advisory board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the scientific advisory board of the Ellison Medical Foundation in Maryland. Following her arrival at Princeton, she created a new undergraduate seminar course, “Hormonally Active Pollutants.”
Ruderman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.