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Maryanna Pearson Henkart ’58

July 2022, In Alexandria, Virginia.

When she was growing up in East Portland, Maryanna wanted to be an actress. But the Rev. O. W. Pearson, her father, convinced her she should be a scientist. She started at Reed as a biology major, living at home until her senior year, when she moved into Anna Mann. Maryanna performed in musicals at Reed and played the wife in the stage production of Death of a Salesman. She wrote her thesis, “Some Preliminary Studies on the Purification of a Tartrate Dehydrating Enzyme in Pea Seeds,” advised by Prof. Helen Stafford [biology 1954–87]. While at Reed, she met and married Arthur Warmoth ’59. They later divorced.

Maryanna earned a PhD in biology from Harvard University and had a two-year fellowship at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. She took a job as a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health and then joined the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, where she became the director of the division of molecular and cellular biosciences. She married Pierre Henkart in 1967; they were divorced in 1988.

Appeared in Reed magazine: December 2022