Paula B Kavathas PhD

Professor of Laboratory Medicine, of Genetics, of Immunobiology and of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology; Associate Chair for Research; Director, Science Education Outreach Program

Biographical Info

Dr. Kavathas graduated with a B.A. in American Institutions, from the University of Wisconsin, writing her thesis on the role of Science in America in the 1960s. She stayed on to obtain her Ph.D. in Genetics from the Department of Genetics, founded in 1921 as the first Genetics Department in the country. At Wisconsin she worked with Dr. Robert DeMars, a pioneer in the genetics of X chromosome inactivation and genetics of Chlamydia trachomatis. At Wisconsin she discovered the HLA-DP gene and used x-rays to develop a set of deletion-mutant cell lines for genetic analysis of the HLA region. She then went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University with Dr. Leonard Herzenberg, the inventor of flow cytometry. She developed a novel approach for cloning genes for cell surface proteins and cloned the gene for the T lymphocyte cell surface protein CD8.

At Yale she continued her studies on CD8 and more recently is studying the obligate intracellular bacteria Chlamydia trachomatis. Dr. Kavathas is a member of the Women Faculty Forum (Yale University) and former Chair of the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Association of Immunologists. She regularly serves on review panels for the National Institutes of Health and was a former Chair of the Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation Study Section. Dr. Kavathas is the founder and Director of the Science Education Outreach Program. Currently she chairs the Awards Committee at the Medical School and is Associate Chair for Research in the Department of Laboratory Medicine.

Education & Training

B.A.

University of Wisconsin-Madison (1972)

Ph.D.

University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980)