Rowena Green Matthews

Rowena Green Matthews is G. Robert Greenberg Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on the role of organic cofactors as partners of enzymes catalyzing difficult biochemical reactions, especially folic acid and cobalamin (vitamin B12). She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2002), the Institute of Medicine (elected 2004), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005), the American Philosophical Society (2009) and the American Academy of Microbiology (2002).

Early life and education

Matthews earned her B. A. in Biology, summa cum laude, from Radcliffe College in 1960. As an undergraduate, and for three years thereafter, she worked with George Wald and published a first author paper in which she first described a new intermediate in the bleaching of the visual pigment rhodopsin that temporally coincided with initiation of visual excitation. She then went to graduate school in Biophysics at the University of Michigan, where she did her dissertation research in the laboratory of Vincent Massey. She received her Ph.D. in 1969.

Career

She was the Frederick Gowland Hopkins Lecturer at 12th International Conference of Pteridines and Folates. She currently serves on the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and on the Council of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Publications

• Matthews, R. G. (2009) Cobalamin- and corrinoid-dependent enzymes, in Metal Carbon Bonds in Enzymes and Cofactors, 6, Metal Ions in Life Sciences, Sigel, A., Sigel, H., and Sigel, R. K. O., eds. RSC Publishing, Cambridge UK, pp. 53–114.