Sondra Schlesinger
Sondra Schlesinger is an American virologist and professor emeritus at the Washington University School of Medicine. Early life and education Schlesinger was born in New Jersey in 1934. She was an undergraduate at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, graduating in 1956 with a degree in chemistry; she remained at the same institution for doctoral work and received her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1960. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Academic career In 1964, Schlesinger joined the faculty of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology (now called the Department of Molecular Microbiology) at the Washington University School of Medicine. She was the first woman faculty member in the department. She remained at the school for the rest of her career, with sabbaticals and visiting positions at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories and at Harvard University. She advanced to full professor in 1977. Schlesinger retired and assumed professor emeritus status in 2001. Schlesinger's research interests focused on microbial genetics and later on the study of enveloped RNA viruses. With her husband and fellow WUSTL professor Milton Schlesinger, she co-edited a major reference work on togaviruses