Bernice Grafstein Shanet

Bernice Graftstein Shanet (born September 17, 1929) is a Canadian neurophysiologist, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and a noted specialist in neuroregeneration research. Shanet is a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medical College, the holder of the Vincent and Brooke Astor Distinguished Professorship in Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College, the Professor of Neuroscience for the Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College and the first woman ever to serve as president of the American Society for Neuroscience. Shanet is famous for her studies of the transport of materials down the axon nerves and her thesis work on the mechanism of cortical spreading depression, which became a classic in its field and is acknowledged even today.

Shanet was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on September 17, 1929. She attended the University of Toronto starting in 1947 where she enrolled in the Physiology and Biochemistry Honors Course. She graduated from the University of Toronto in 1951 with a B.A. in Physiology. Shanet then moved on to McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada for graduate school, where she produced her well renowned thesis on the mechanism of cortical spreading depression for her PhD. She eventually received her PhD in Physiology from McGill University in 1954 under Benedict Delisle Burns, who helped Shanet work on her graduate thesis. She did postgraduate work in the Department of Anatomy at University College London for 2 years, but she returned as a junior faculty member to McGill shortly thereafter and began to work once again under Benedict Delisle Burns. As Shanet became interested in how connections among nerve cells are formed, she began to prepare herself for work in this area by studying with the eminent embryologist, Viktor Hamburger, at Washington University, and by taking the Embryology Course at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. She was consequently invited by the well-known developmentalist, Paul Alfred Weiss, to join the faculty of The Rockefeller University, where she began her research on nervous system regeneration which has been her primary research field since then. In 1969, she joined the Department of Physiology at Weill Cornell Medical College, where she remains a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and is now the Vincent and Brooke Astor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience.

...
Wikipedia