Paola S. Timiras, M.D., Ph.D.Dr. Paola S. Timiras was born Born Paola Silvestri on July 21, 1923 Rome, Italy. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1947 and her Ph.D. from the University of Montreal in 1952. During her postdoctoral work at the University of Montreal her supervisor was the endocrinologist Hans Selye. One of Timiras's colleagues was fellow postdoc and future Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin. Hans Selye, who had developed the first theories about the body's hormonal responses to stress. At his suggestion, Timiras applied for and won a research fellowship that allowed her to work in his lab. There, she studied how stress influences the immune system through the effects of adrenocortical hormones. Before she finished her degree, the university hired her as an assistant professor. Very little research had scrutinized the effects of hormones on the brain, so she decided to focus on this area. In 1954, she moved to Salt Lake City to pursue that line of inquiry in the pharmacology department at the University of Utah. In 1955, she joined the University of California, Berkeley physiology department as an assistant physiologist and was appointed to the faculty in 1958. She became a full professor in 1967, and Professor Emeritus in 1994. Dr. Timiras and Dr. Paul Segall established the Center for Research and Education on Aging (CREA) at UC Berkeley in 2000. She has published more than 15 books and hundreds of peer reviewed papers. Recently at UC Berkeley, Timiras and her graduate students, in collaboration with Steven A. Garan, studied the effects of caloric restriction on various hypothalamic nuclei, specifically the effects on cell density, estrogen receptor alpha immunoreactivity and insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) receptor immunoreactivity. An Automated Imaging Microscope System (AIMS) was developed in order to generate three-dimensional maps of the mouse hypothalamus.
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