Mayana Zatz

Mayana Zatz (; born July 16, 1947) is a Brazilian molecular biologist and geneticist. She is a professor at the University of São Paulo, is its Research dean.

Biography Professor Zatz's accomplishments have been recognized and she has received many awards and prizes, including the 2000 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science and Claudia Magazine's Woman of the Year Award in 2001.

Born in Israel in 1947, she moved to France with her family and lived there until the age of seven years. Her father, Lony Eden (1912-1984) was from Dorohoi, Romania and her mother Ella Kott Eden (b.1914) was from Warsaw. In 1939, her parents fled the Wehrmacht’s advance and arrived in Israel where Mayana and her sister were born. Mayana arrived in Brazil with her family in 1955. and a recipient of the 2003 TWAS Prize.

Since the beginning of her career Mayana has assisted approximately 16,000 people of families affected by genetic diseases (mostly neuromuscular problems), which is the highest number of cases registered in the world. In the latter part of 1995, Mayana, professor , and doctorate student Eloísa de Sá Moreira were the first scientists in the world to find one of the genes related to a dystrophy which affects the arms and legs. They also mapped the gene responsible for the Knobloch syndrome, which causes a type of progressive blindness.