Margaret oakley dayhoff biography for kids

She did postdoctoral studies at the Rockefeller Institute now Rockefeller University and the University of Maryland, and joined the newly established National Biomedical Research Foundation in She was the first woman to hold office in the Biophysical Society and the first person to serve as both secretary and eventually president. References Margaret Oakley Dayhoff.

John T. Scopes Scopes Trial: John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in Tennessee. She was the first woman to hold office in the Biophysical Society and the first person to serve as both secretary and eventually president. Dayhoff was born an only child in Philadelphia , but moved to New York City when she was ten.

Her academic promise was evident from the outset — she was valedictorian class of at Bayside High School, Bayside, New York , and from there received a scholarship to Washington Square College of New York University , graduating magna cum laude in mathematics in and getting elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In her graduate thesis, Dayhoff pioneered the use of computer capabilities — i.

Her management of her research data was so impressive that she was awarded a Watson Computing Laboratory Fellowship. As part of this award, she received access to "cutting-edge IBM electronic data processing equipment" at the lab. MacInnes at the Rockefeller Institute from to In , she moved to Maryland with her family and later received research fellowships from the University of Maryland — , working on a model of chemical bonding with Ellis Lippincott.

At Maryland, she gained her first exposure to a new high-speed computer, the IBM model After this ended, she joined the National Biomedical Research Foundation in as Associate Director a position she held for 21 years. At the NBRF, she began to work with Robert Ledley , a dentist who had obtained a degree in physics and become interested in the possibilities of applying computational resources to biomedical problems.

He had authored one of the earliest studies of biomedical computation, "Report on the Use of Computer in Biology and Medicine. They actually began this work in , but were not able to start programming until late In the early s, Dayhoff also collaborated with Ellis Lippincott and Carl Sagan to develop thermodynamic models of cosmo-chemical systems, including prebiological planetary atmospheres.

She developed a computer program that could calculate equilibrium concentrations of the gases in a planetary atmosphere, enabling the study of the atmospheres of Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, in addition to the present day atmosphere and the primordial terrestrial atmosphere. Using this program, she considered whether the primordial atmosphere had the conditions necessary to generate life.

Although she found that numerous small biologically important compounds can appear with no special nonequilibrium mechanism to explain their presence, there were compounds necessary to life that were scarce in the equilibrium model such as ribose, adenine, and cytosine. Dayhoff also taught physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center for 13 years, served as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected councillor of the International Society for the Study of the Origins of Life in after 8 years of membership.

In , Dayhoff pioneered the use of computers in comparing protein sequences and reconstructing their evolutionary histories from sequence alignments. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools.

Margaret oakley dayhoff biography for kids

Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American biophysicist. Philadelphia , Pennsylvania. Silver Spring, Maryland. Early life [ edit ]. Research [ edit ]. Table of Dayhoff's encoding of amino acids [ edit ]. Marriage and family [ edit ]. Later life [ edit ]. Legacy [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Dayhoff —". DNA and Cell Biology.

ISSN PMID Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. July 1, S2CID Women in Medicine: An Encyclopedia. ISBN Archived from the original on April 24, Retrieved March 16, The Washington Post. February 8, Archived from the original on March 28, Retrieved October 20, May 22, JHU Press. Columbia Engineering Quarterly. Archived from the original on May 23,