Ruxandra Sireteanu

Biography

Ruxandra Sireteanu was born in Mediaș, Romania, on 19 September 1945. She entered the University of Bucharest in 1963 and graduated in physics in 1968 with a thesis entitled Romanian: Aspecte teoretice și experimentale ale potențialului de repaus membranar (Theoretical and Experimental Aspects of the Resting Membrane Potential). She then joined the Center for Radiobiology and Molecular Biology as a researcher, subsequently being appointed assistant professor at the Institute of Oil, Gas and Geology in Bucharest. She attended the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa for her doctorate study from 1972, defending her thesis in biophysics "Contributions to the Study of the Visual Function, using Spatially Periodicals" in 1976, and then undertook postdoctoral research at the Universities of Ulm and Lausanne. In 1978, she joined the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, where she worked as part of Wolf Singer's team.

Sireteanu took up the role of leading the team at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main from 1984. At the same time, she was offered a visiting position at University of California, Berkeley, in 1983, and was named Greenman-Petty Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 1987. In 1990, she successfully defended her habilitation thesis in neuroscience entitled "Development and Plasticity of Visual functions: Psychophysical, Electrophysiological and Clinical Studies". She was subsequently presented with awards from the Heinz and Helene Adam Stiftung for Excellence in Research in Ophthalmology in 1991 and from the Bielschowsky Society for Research in Strabismus in 1994.

In 1995, Sireteanu began working with the Goethe University Frankfurt, and drew together a collaboration between the university and the local Max Planck Institute for Brain Research focusing on behavioral neuroscience that ultimately led to the creation of a chair in Biological Psychology in 1999. Sireteanu was the first appointee. Her research centred on studies of the way that the human visual system develops from a newborn baby into adulthood, both for healthy individuals and those with disorders in their binocular vision, including amblyopia. She published extensively, often in English, in journals like Vision Research where she was also appointed co-editor.

She supervised doctoral students and was known for her approach to mentoring that emphasized creativity and academic rigor. After more than a decade working in Frankfurt, she accepted an invitation to give a lecture on recent developments in the understanding of amblyopia at the Department of Biophysics of the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, traveling there in mid-2008. This was her final visit to her country of birth. She died on 8 September 2008, leaving behind her husband, Dan H. Constantinescu, and two children, Sorin and Laura.