Paola S. Timiras

Paola Silvestri was born on July 21, 1923, in Rome, Italy, just after Italy's takeover by Mussolini and his Fascist movement. Her father, a statistician and strong anti-Fascist, fled the following year to France, where his daughter visited often. Even as a girl, she dreamed of becoming a doctor, like her grandfather and uncle.

Silvestri obtained her medical degree from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1947.[1] She married Romanian diplomat Nicholas Timiras and then moved with him to Canada where she studied experimental medicine and surgery at the Université de Montréal, gaining her doctorate in 1952.[2] During her postdoctoral work at the University of Montreal her supervisor was the endocrinologist Hans Selye.[3] One of Timiras's colleagues was Roger Guillemin.[4]

Timiras performed her doctoral research at the University of Montreal in the lab of Hans Selye, who had developed the first theories about the body's hormonal responses to stress.[3] 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 of Montreal hired her as an assistant professor.[3][4] 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.[5]

At UC Berkeley, Timiras 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 was developed by her research colleague Steven A. Garan, in order to generate three-dimensional maps of the mouse hypothalamus.[6][7]

In the 1960s, Timiras developed a course on the physiology of aging, one of the first such courses in the United States.[4] In 2001, at age 78, Timiras became one of the founding members of the Center for Research and Education on Aging at the University of California, Berkeley,[5] for which she served as the first chair.[8]

She contributed to or edited over 420 articles and 15 books before her death at the age of 85 of heart failure on September 12, 2008, after putting in a full day's work. Timiras had recently had heart valve replacement surgery.[3][5] Nicholas Timiras, her husband of nearly 50 years, who had earned a Ph.D. degree in Italian from UC Berkeley in 1978 (at age 66), died in 1996. They had a daughter and a son.

• 1970: President, Iota Sigma Pi, Association of Women Chemists
• 1974-1982: Vice-President and President, International Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology
• 1978-1982: President, International Society of Developmental Neuroscience
• 1984: Silver Award from the University of Chieti Medical School, Italy, for consultation on establishing courses on aging
• 1985: Gold Medal for Research Award, American Aging Association
• 1987: Andres Bello Decoration from Venezuela for contributing to international biomedical advancement
• 1990: Medal from University of Paris, XI, for promotion of joint Paris XI-UC Berkeley programs in biomedical sciences
• 1991: Medal from University of Pau (France), for fostering France-USA cultural relations
• 1996: Medal from University of Pisa (Italy), for fostering Italy-USA scientific/ biomedical relations