Elizabeth D. Hay
Elizabeth Dexter Hay was born in St. Augustine, Florida in 1927. She attended Smith College, where she took a biology course with one of her first scientific mentors, S. Meryl Rose. She attended from Johns Hopkins Medical School as one of four women in the class of 1952. She held professorships at Johns Hopkins, and later at Cornell Medical College. In 1969, Hay was named the Louise Foote Pfeiffer Professor of Embryology at Harvard Medical School, and she served as the Chair of the Department of Anatomy (later the Department of Cell Biology) from 1975 to 1993. Hay was the first woman to be made a full professor in a preclinical department at Harvard Medical School.
An expert in electron microscopy, one of Hay’s greatest scientific achievements was her breakthrough understanding of the extracellular matrix. Once thought to be an inert support structure, Hay found that it was in fact a complex structure that has a large role in determining cell properties. Hay’s research formed the foundation of an entire field of cell and developmental biology. In her later work, she researched cell-matrix interactions in cell migration and epithelial-mesenchymal transformations in embryos and in palatal and corneal development in the chick embryo.