Ursula Storb, immunologist and role model for women scientists, 1936-2023

Ursula Storb, MD, immunologist and Professor Emeritus of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago, died on December 15, 2023. She was 87 years old.

Storb joined the faculty at UChicago in 1986 after a successful 18-year tenure at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she served as the head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. During a 29-year career at UChicago, she was a member of the Committees on Immunology, Cancer Biology, Genetics, Genomics & Systems Biology, as well as Development, Regeneration & Stem Cell Biology. She taught graduate and undergraduate courses in immunology, molecular biology, vertebrate developmental genetics, and cell biology until she retired from the active faculty in 2015.

Storb was highly regarded for her work on somatic hypermutation (SHM) of the immunoglobulin light chain encoding genes. She helped create the first mice with transgenic expression of an immunoglobulin gene, which she then used to study the role of transcription, chromatin, error-prone DNA repair, and activation-induced cytosine deaminase (AID) in SHM. Her lab also identified multiple key transcriptional regulators that impact SHM which have broad and critical functions in immune cell regulation.

Colleagues remember Storb as a great storyteller with a warm, albeit blunt, manner who trained several notable scientists in the field. She became one of the first members of the Association of Women in Science (AWIS) in 1971 and advocated for greater support for women in STEM fields. In 1993, she founded a faculty committee to support graduate students from under-represented minorities in science and encouraged female undergraduate students working in her lab to introduce them to various types of scientific bench work.

“I first met Ursula at a scientific meeting when I was a graduate student working on B cell development,” said Barbara Kee, PhD, Professor of Pathology and Chair of the Committee on Cancer Biology at UChicago. “She was a major figure in the field, but she took the time to ask me questions about my research and offered suggestions and encouragement. One of the benefits of choosing UChicago for a faculty position was knowing that Ursula would be a rigorous but supportive colleague.”

Storb was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences in 2007. Her longtime partner, collaborator, and fellow Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, Terry Martin, PhD, died on April 12, 2023.