Pamela Bjorkman
Associate professor of biology, Caltech

Pamela Bjorkman is an associate professor of biology at Caltech, where she is one of six women among 32 faculty members in the division of biology, one of the premier biology departments in the nation. She was born in Portland, Oregon, and even though she won a gold medal in junior high school at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry Science Fair, she didn't become interested in science as a career until she was in college.

Bjorkman majored in chemistry at the University of Oregon, where Dr. Hayes Griffith, a man, and Dr. Pat Jost, a woman, both were important mentors for her. She studied biochemistry in graduate school at Harvard, and soon became interested in the structure of protein - that is, how the hundreds of atoms in a protein fit together to give it a distinctive shape.

Working in the laboratory of Dr. Don Wiley, Bjorkman began a project to solve the structure of HLA-A2, a molecule that plays a crucial role in the human immune system. This work led to her PhD in 1984, and she continued to work with Wiley until 1986, eventually figuring out HLA's structure. In recognition of this major contribution to our understanding of the immune system, she and Wiley received the 1994 Gairdner Award, a prestigious international prize for achievements in medical science.

After leaving Harvard, Bjorkman worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Mark Davis at Stanford, where she learned recombinant DNA techniques. These skills enable her to create the large batches of purified protein necessary to study a protein's structure.

In 1989 Pamela joined the faculty at Caltech, where her lab studies the structure and function of molecules on the surfaces of cells. These molecules are involved in the immune and nervous systems. In addition to her position at Caltech, she is an associate investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She met her husband, developmental neurobiologist Kai Zinn, in graduate school at Harvard, and they were fortunate to find faculty positions together at Caltech. Their leisure activities center around the outdoors, including rock climbing, hiking and camping. They have two children: Leif, who was seven last fall and Katya, who is two.