Zena Werb [interview by Fiona M Watt

Abstract

Zena Werb was born in Bergenbelsen, Germany to Polish Jewish parents. As a post-war refugee, with her family she moved from Wroclaw, Poland to Milan, Italy. From there they immigrated to Canada, first to Saskatchewan and then to southern Ontario, where Zena grew up on a farm. She went to the University of Toronto, where she read Honours Biochemistry, receiving a BSc in 1966. Studying with the late Professor Zanvil A. Cohn, Zena received her PhD in cell biology from The Rockefeller University, New York. Her post-doctoral work was at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, UK. After one year on the faculty of Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, she joined the University of California, San Francisco, as an Assistant Professor in the Laboratory of Radiobiology. She is currently Professor and Vice-Chair of Anatomy and a member of the Program in Biological Sciences and Biomedical Sciences Program at the University of California, San Francisco. Zena's research is on the roles of matrix metalloproteinases in normal and pathological tissues, concentrating on mouse models of bone and mammary gland development. She has demonstrated the importance of proteolysis as a mechanism of altering extracellular signaling. She has shown that remodeling of the extracellular matrix and the cellular microenvironment by stromal and inflammatory cells contributes to development of tumors as aberrant organs.