Hay, Elizabeth D.

Elizabeth D. Hay was named the Louise Foote Pfeiffer Professor of Embryology in 1969, and in 1975 was the first woman to be made full professor in a Harvard Medical School preclinical department. She was the chair of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology from 1975-1993. Dr. Hay's greatest scientific achievement was her breakthrough understanding of the extracellular matrix. Once thought to be an inert support structure, Dr. Hay found that it was in fact a a complex structure that has a large role in determining cell properties. Dr. Hay's research formed the foundation of an entire field in cellular biology.

Elizabeth D. Hay (1927-2007), B.A., 1948, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; M.D., 1952, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, Maryland, was chair of the Department of Anatomy (later the Department of Cell Biology) at Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, and the first woman to be made a full professor in a preclinical department at Harvard Medical School.

Elizabeth Dexter Hay was born in St. Augustine, Florida in 1927. Her father was a military physician during World War II and, as a child, her family moved from Florida to Mississippi and, later, Kansas. In 1944, she entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated with her bachelor’s degree in 1948. During her time at Smith, she took a biology course with S. Meryl Rose, one of her first scientific mentors, who advised her to attend medical school. She attended Johns Hopkins Medical School as one of four women in the class of 1952. After graduation, she interned at Johns Hopkins from 1952 to 1953. Hay took her first professional position at Johns Hopkins as an instructor and then Assistant Professor of Anatomy. In 1957, she left Johns Hopkins to take a position as the Assistant Professor of Anatomy at Cornell Medical College in New York City. In 1960, she left Cornell to move to Harvard Medical School, again as Assistant Professor of Anatomy. In 1964, Hay was named the Louise Foote Pfeiffer Associate Professor of Embryology. Hay was the Chair of the Department of Anatomy from 1975 to 1993. Hay remained at Harvard Medical School for the rest of her career, retiring as a Professor of Cell Biology in 2005.

Hay’s research focused on cell biology and was core to the discovery and development of work on the extracellular matrix during the 1970s. In her later work, she researched cell-matrix interactions in cell migration and epithelial-mesenchymal transformations in embryos and on palatal and corneal development in the chick embryo. She was a member of a number of professional societies including the American Association of Anatomists, the American Society for Cell Biology, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Society for Developmental Biology. She was the first woman to be president of the American Society of Cell Biology (1976-1977) and the Society for Developmental Biology (1973-1974). She was also elected President of the American Association of Anatomists (1981-1982). Hay received the E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology in 1988, the Henry Gray Award from the American Association of Anatomists in 1992, and the E.G. Conklin Award from the Society for Developmental Biology in 1997. In 1999, Harvard Medical School created a named fellowship in Hay’s honor.

Elizabeth D. Hay died in 2007 in Massachusetts.