Margaret oakley dayhoff biography

Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff (March 11, 1925 – February 5, 1983) was an American Biophysicist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics.
Dayhoff is known as the founder of bioinformatics.
Margaret Belle Dayhoff was an American Biophysicist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics.

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MARGARET BELLE DAYHOFF (1925–1983)

Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff (1925-1983) was an American physical chemist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. She dedicated her career to applying the evolving computational technologies to support advances in biology and medicine, most notably the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases and tools to interrogate the databases. Dayhoff graduated from New York University in 1945 with a bachelor of arts and earned a PhD. in quantum chemistry in 1948 at Columbia University. She was a research assistant at the Rockefeller Institute from 1948 to 1951 and had been associate director of the National Biomedical Research Foundation in Washington, DC, since 1960. Dr. Dayhoff was widely known in the scientific community for establishing a large computer data base of protein structures as well as for being the author of the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure, a multivolume reference work. She initiated this collection of protein sequences in the Atlas, a book collecting all known protein sequences that she published in 1965. It

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Celebrating Women's History: Margaret Oakley Dayhoff

Dr. Margaret Oakley Dayhoff worked at the intersection of several scientific disciplines to bring the analytical power of computers to the broader research community. Her approach was revolutionary to a wide variety of fields, from chemistry and biology to physics and even planetary science (in collaboration with Carl Sagan and Ellis Lippincott). But she is best known for founding an entirely new field: today, she is remembered as “both mother and father of bioinformatics.”

In the mid-1940s when Dayhoff first embarked on her PhD in quantum chemistry, the most advanced computing technologies were not only unwieldy and obtuse but developed during World War II for military purposes. The very few computers that existed had only just begun to expand beyond the realm of mathematicians and military scientists. But Dayhoff happened to be studying at Columbia University, home of one of the only computer systems in the world at the time, and having earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics, she became one of the first r

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ProfessorMargaretDayhoff

Born11th March, 1925 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States) - Died5th February, 1983 (Silver Spring, Maryland, United States)

Dayhoff is known as the founder of bioinformatics. This she did by pioneering the application of mathematics and computational techniques to the sequencing of proteins and nucleic acids and establishing the first publicly available database for research in the area.

Margaret Dayhoff (Photo credit: Ruth Dayhoff)

Family

Margaret Oakley Dayhoff was the only child of Kenneth W. Oakley and Ruth P. Clark. Dayhoff's parents moved with her to New York City ten years after she was born in Philadelphia. In 1948 she married Edward S Dayhoff, whom she had met at high school. He had served in the Navy and became a physicist, being known for his pioneering work on the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. The two of them moved to Maryland in 1952 when Edward went to work for the National Bureau of Standards. They had two daughters, Ruth and Judith.

Education

Dayhoff attended Bayside High School in New York. She