Biophysical Society Bulletin | December 2019

Biophysicist in Profile

PernillaWittung-Stafshede Areas of Research

Institution Chalmers University

Protein folding and misfolding, in vitro and in vivo; copper-transport mechanisms in human cells

At-a-Glance

Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede is a professor doing biophysics at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. She did her doctoral work in Sweden and postdoctoral work in the United States, where she remained for 12 years as faculty before returning to Sweden for a professorship in the north- ern city of Umeå. In 2019 she began leading the world’s largest university initiative on gender equality.

Pernilla Wittung Stafshede

Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede was born in 1968 in the Swedish town of Umeå. Her father was a PhD student at the newly established university and her mother worked for the postal service. After her father concluded his thesis work for a PhD in inorganic chemistry, he accepted a position at a welding company and moved the family to Gothenburg. During her early school years, Wittung-Stafshede was a shy child with a talent for math. In high school, her math and physics teacher challenged the class with university level problems. Most students were upset, but this sparked an interest for her in pursuing the subjects in higher education. Before entering university, she spent a year in California working as an au pair. During this period, she gained new skills and insight: she learned English and realized that changing diapers was only fun for a brief period of time. Back in Sweden, she began her undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. This was the only program with female students but, she says, she enrolled because she did not have good enough grades to get into the physics program. Early on, she realized that she did not want to become a chemical engineer; she was more inclined toward basic science. In her last year, she was an ex- change student at Imperial College in London, where she truly learned what it was like to do research — and she loved it. She returned to Sweden with her combined bachelors and masters degree and started her PhD studies in physical chemistry at Chalmers with Bengt Norden working on DNA analogs and recombination. Norden believed in giving his trainees autonomy, which was good for Wittung-Stafshede, as it allowed her to pursue her ideas and ambitions. She re- members her PhD years as a wonderful time when she came in to the lab every day and focused solely on experiments — her mom worried that she never did anything else. After four years, in December 1996, she finished her PhD degree.

In January 1997, she married Patric , who was her classmate in the undergraduate program, and in February of that year she moved to California for her postdoc at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the lab of Harry Gray . At that time, it was a quest to find out how fast proteins could fold and she used laser-triggering methods to find a small protein that folded in only a few microseconds. During her postdoc, she lightheartedly applied for faculty po- sitions in the United States, not really expecting to make the move. When she received calls for interviews, however, she took the idea seriously and accepted a faculty position in the Chemistry Department at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1999. She was the first female faculty member in the de- partment. In less than three years, at the same time her first daughter was born, she sent in her tenure package.

Wittung-Stafshede with her sisters, daughters, nieces, and nephew

December 2019

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