Dr. Mayana Zatz

Molecular Biologist and Geneticist

Brazil

Brazilian molecular biologist and geneticist. She is a professor at the University of São Paulo, currently being its Research dean.

Professor Zatz's accomplishments have been recognized and she has received many awards and prizes, including the 2000 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science and the 2001 Claudia Woman of the Year Award, by Claudia Magazine.

Mayana obtained a BA in Biology at University of São Paulo in 1968, a M.Sc. and a D.Sc. in Biological Sciences from University of São Paulo in 1970 and 1974, respectively, her post-doctorate in Medical Genetics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1977, and her livre-docência from University of São Paulo, in 1987. Mayana became interested in the study of muscular dystrophies when she was at college and followed a patient from a family with a high incidence of the condition, and who wanted to start a family.

In 1969, Dr Zatz started her work in genetic counseling in families which were carriers of neuromuscular diseases, in order to evaluate as well as to inform the risk of having offspring with a similar problem. Twelve years later she contacted these same families again, and found that most of the high risk families had avoided having children. On the other hand, Mayana was shocked to see the way the sick children born during that period had been abandoned. These children, who generally had a normal mental development but whose muscular problems were not treated, neither went to school nor underwent physical therapy.

Currently Mayana is a member of the International Human Genome Project of the Academy of Sciences of the State of São Paulo, and of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. According to the Institute for Scientific Information, her work has been cited 1,500 times in 102 publications between 1977 and 1997. She has had 173 papers and approximately 150 articles published in foreign magazines such as "Nature Genetics" and "Human Molecular Genetics". Mayana is also columnist of Brazilian Veja Magazine[2] and a recipient of the 2003 TWAS Prize.[3]