 |
||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
At just under 5 feet tall, Annie Le ’13PhD was “a tiny young lady,” in the words of her thesis adviser, Anton Bennett, “but she gave the impression she was larger than her physical self.” Born in California to Vietnamese American parents, she was valedictorian at Union Mine High School in El Dorado, California. She won scholarships to study bioscience at the University of Rochester, where she met Jonathan Widawsky. She and Widawsky were to be married on September 13, the day her body was found at 10 Amistad. After her graduation from Rochester in 2007, Le was admitted to the PhD program in pharmacology at Yale. She worked in Bennett’s laboratory studying enzymes called phosphatases and their role in human metabolic diseases and won a grant from the National Science Foundation last year to support her research. Bennett remembers her “as a diligent and incredibly hard-working student who showed a passion for science and the desire to make a difference in people’s lives.” But Le was also known in and out of the lab for a caring attitude toward her friends, a sunny personality, and a sense of style. At an October 12 memorial service for Le at Battell Chapel, fellow graduate student Tara Bancroft ’14PhD eulogized her friend as someone who could “wear five-inch heels while doing laborious mouse surgeries, eat fried chicken and not gain a pound, and use smiley faces in her presentations and not lose anyone’s respect.” At that same memorial service, Yale president Richard C. Levin ’74PhD described Le as “a model student for the Yale of the twenty-first century: a child of immigrants, raised in America, bright and accomplished, ambitious and disciplined, yet caring, loving, and spontaneous.” The testimony of those who knew Le suggests that this
was a person more remarkable than the circumstances of her death. In Bennett’s
words, she was “a bright light of enormous potential prematurely extinguished.” |
Related |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
|