Terry Orr-Weaver

Terry L. Orr-Weaver is an American molecular biologist in the MIT Department of Biology with a joint appointment to the Whitehead Institute. She does research on developmental biology, with a focus on "oordination of cell growth and division with development, with particular focus on the oocyte-to-embryo transition, control of cell size, and regulation of metazoan DNA replication." Orr-Weaver and her collaborators have identified two proteins necessary for the proper sorting of chromosomes during meiosis with implications for cancer and birth defects. In 2006 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Academic and research career Orr-Weaver was a faculty member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also at the Whitehead Institute, both of which she joined in 1987. She was appointed an American Cancer Society Research Professor at MIT in 2008. She served as the President of the Genetics Society of America in 2005, and President of the National Drosophila Board in 2008. They have also established that Inducer of Meiosis 4 (IME4) is required for an important step, Notch signaling, to occur in fruit fly ovaries.

She is the co-author, with Harvey Lodish, of the book Model Organisms: Drosophila, published in 1997 by Academic Press.

In 1994, Orr-Weaver was one of 16 women faculty in the School of Science at MIT who drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, which started a campaign to highlight and challenge gender discrimination at MIT.

Awards and honors 2005–06 President of the Genetics Society of America 2006 Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology