Carolyn Slayman

Carolyn Walch Slayman (1937–2016) was an American geneticist. She was on the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine, where she was appointed Sterling Professor in 1991.

On March 11, 1937, she was born in Portland, Maine. In 1958, she graduated from Swarthmore College with highest honors in biology and chemistry and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She began graduate school at Johns Hopkins University to study biochemistry but transferred to Rockefeller University in 1959 where she was the only woman in her class. After a short time stint as an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve, she joined the Yale departments of microbiology and physiology in 1967. Seven years later, she became only the second woman to be named a Sterling Professor.