Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Born July 19, 1921, in New York. American medical physicist.

Yalow graduated from Hunter College in 1941. She was an assistant professor of physics at the college from 1946 to 1950, when she was appointed a physicist and assistant chief of the radioisotope service at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital. In 1970 she was named chief of the hospital’s nuclear medicine service. Yalow concurrently served as a consultant for the Lenox Hill Hospital from 1956 to 1962, and she was named a professor at a medical school in 1968.

Yalow’s principal works deal with the use of radioimmunoassay to determine the levels of insulin, parathyroid hormone, gastrin, and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) in the blood and the tissues of the endocrine glands.

Yalow shared a Nobel Prize in 1977 with R. Guillemin and A. V. Schally.