Iva Greenwald


Iva Susan Greenwald is an American biologist who is Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at Columbia University. She studies cell-cell interactions and cell fate specification in C. elegans. She is particularly interested in LIN-12/Notch proteins, which are the receptor of one of the major signalling systems that determine the fate of cells.

Early life and education

Greenwald joined MIT as a graduate student in 1977. She was trained in the classics of molecular biology and developmental genetics. That year, H. Robert Horvitz joined the faculty at MIT, and convinced her to investigate C. elegans. She started working on genetics, and functional redundancy cell-lineage mutants. She moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1983 where she worked alongside Jonathan Hodgkin, Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros, who encouraged her to try to clone LIN-12. It took her two years to develop a strategy to clone LIN-12, and she identified that that genetic sequence contained epidermal growth factor motifs. These investigations were amongst the first to show that worm developmental genes could be cloned, and that aspects of these genes were homologous to human proteins.

Research and career

In 1986, Greenwald joined the faculty at Princeton University. She moved to Columbia University in 1993 and became made professor two years later. Greenwald dedicated her career to understanding the mechanisms that underpin the LIN-12/Notch signalling system. LIN-12/Notch proteins mediate cell-cell interactions. Amongst these processes, Greenwald studies the role of LIN-12/Notich in binary regulation, feedback mechanisms and signal transduction. She has identified new genes that are involved with the modulation of LIN-12/Notch in development and disease.

Awards and honors

Greenwald is married to Gary Struhl, with whom she has a daughter.