Leona D. Samson
Biological engineer (born 1952)
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Education and career
Samson received her Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry from the University of Aberdeen in 1974. She then went on to complete her PhD in Molecular Biology from the University College London in 1978. She did five years of postdoctoral research at UCSF and UC Berkeley before joining the faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1983. In 2001 MIT recruited her and she now holds two endowed professorships at MIT, one being the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor and the other is the American Cancer Society Research Professor in the departments of Biological Engineering and Biology. She was also an adjunct professor of toxicology at Harvard University. In 2001 she became the director of the Center for Environmental Health Sciences at MIT. She leads a lab at MIT focusing on researching DNA alkylation repair and developing methods by which one can measure DNA repair capacity. She was recognized by the NIH for her work in 2009, when she was awarded the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award, a funded grant awarded to "[support] individual scientists of exceptional creativity, who propose pioneering – and possibly transforming approaches – to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research." Since 2007 she has been a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "the world's largest general scientific society". She has also been elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Research area
Samson specializes in bacterial, yeast, mouse and human DNA repair. Specifically, her lab's goal is to "understand the biology, the biochemistry, and the genetics of numerous DNA repair pathways that act upon DNA alkylation damage." This is applicable to human cancer research, because alkylating agents are used extensively in chemotherapy and other cancer treatments. This work is also applicable to environmental exposures to alkylating agents in the food we eat, the fluids we drink and the air we breath. She is researching "how eukaryotic cells respond to alkylating agents." Alkylating agents are drugs which work by replacing a hydrogen with an alkyl group, with the result being DNA damage. Alkylating agents inhibit replication, transcription and protein synthesis and thus damage rapidly dividing cells, among which cancer cells are primarily affected because they divide so rapidly. She measures cells' ability to resist the toxicity caused by DNA-damaging agents, like alkylating agents.
Awards
- American Cancer Society Scholar Award (1985)
- American Cancer Society Faculty Research Award (1987)
- Burroughs Wellcome Toxicology Scholar Award (1993)
- AACR Women in Cancer Research Award (2000)
- Environmental Mutagen Society Annual Award for Research Excellence (2001)
- American Cancer Society Research Professor (2001)
- Elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) (2003)
- Elected President of the Environmental Mutagen Society (2004)
- Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2007)
- NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2009)
- Senior Scholar Award from the Ellison Medical Foundation (2012)
- Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2014–15)
- Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021)
Personal life
Samson married David Hunter, the dean for academic affairs and current acting dean of the faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health, on August 5, 1989. They adopted their daughter, Claire, in 1994.