Germ Cells are Forever
Ruth Lehmann, Ph.D.
Professor of Biology
Director, Whitehead Institute
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
Lehmann earned her undergraduate degree and a PhD in biology with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard from the University of Tübingen, in her home country of Germany. She has conducted research at the University of Washington, the University of Freiburg, the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, She was a Member of the Whitehead Institute Member and on the faculty of MIT from 1988-1996. She then moved to New York University (NYU), where she served in a number of leadership roles specifically as the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology and director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine (2006-2020) and from 2014-2020 as the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine. She also became an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1990 and again in 1997. In 2020, Lehmann took on the role of president and director of the Whitehead Institute. She has received national and international recognition including election to the National Academy of Sciences as Foreign Associate in 2005, election as Associate Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2012, and election as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2024, and was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science in 2021. She served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology in 2021 and is currently editor-in-chief of the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, August 27, 2025