S T A N F O R D M E D I C I N E

Volume 17 Number 3 FALL 2000


On the Cover

Admitting Women to Medical School for More than a Century. 

Cover illustration by Janet Woolley.

Stanford Medicine, published quarterly by Stanford University Medical Center, aims to keep readers informed about the education, research, clinical care and other goings on at the Medical Center.

 

 

For the special section for Alumni, click on the link below:
STANFORD
MD

 

seriously sentimental

NOT FOR MDS ONLY


Lessons from her small-town upbringing serve this alumna well in her career on the cutting edge of immunology.

 

By Chris Dingman

 

MARY REMEMBERS her grandmother standing in the front door calling her while she hid outside. Grandma was a piano teacher. Mary was five. The two were engaged in a ritual that occurred every day as the time of Mary's piano lesson neared. Soon, Mary would come inside and endure the lesson.

Eventually, White-Scharf grew to love the piano, especially Bach. She even considered pursuing music as a profession. But she was also restless and anxious, as she puts it, "to avoid the careers that were thought of as typical women's professions." At that time, she adds, those included being a piano teacher. So she pursued a less stereotypically female career -- in biomedical research. Now, from her current position as vice president of research at the biotechnology company BioTransplant Inc., she finds herself on the cutting edge of immunology. At BioTransplant, she manages the company's research efforts to develop drugs and technologies to help transplant patients overcome the problems of cell, tissue and organ rejection.

Even though -- or perhaps because -- the last person in her family to attend college was her great-grandfather, White-Scharf's parents felt strongly that she should use education as a path to more opportunity and success. So Mary made her way from the tiny Texas town of Winnsboro to Southern Methodist University, where she majored in biology, and on to a masters' program in physiology at the University of Texas at Galveston and then to Stanford University School of Medicine, earning a PhD in medical microbiology here in 1978. Since Stanford, White-Scharf has done postdoctoral work at the University of Cologne and at MIT, become the resident immunology specialist at RepliGen Corp., where she worked on developing HIV therapeutics, and then moved to BioTransplant in 1991, where she has held her current position since 1995.

Though her career has led her out of the lab and into "supervising those who supervise the lab personnel," White-Scharf still enjoys her work, she says, particularly strategizing and getting people to work together. Perhaps one can see something of her small-town upbringing in her attitude to management: "I try to keep an open door policy so that a lot of people drop into my office to discuss various issues. I think that in order to be a good scientific leader, it's critical to stay in touch with what is going on in the labs. I also try to walk down the halls frequently to talk to people instead of just picking up the phone or sending an e-mail. I think people appreciate it and it also helps me to remain accessible to everyone and not just the senior people who report to me. That is very important to me."

Indeed, White-Scharf seems to have struck an admirable balance between her cutting-edge career in biotech and staying in touch with her past. Of Stanford, she says, "I did feel that I had a very positive experience. After graduating, it seemed natural to join the alumni association as a means of staying in touch with what was going on.

"Or maybe I'm just overly sentimental," adds White-Scharf, who is one of just a handful of non-MD alumni who attend School of Medicine alumni events.

Music, too, has remained important to her, even if she can get in only 15 to 20 minutes on the piano at the end of a long day. Her three children all have had piano lessons, though one now spends more time on the drums and another on violin. And, after all these years, she's still taking lessons. This time, though, it's voluntary -- having played classical music her whole life, Mary is now learning jazz improvisation. "When I went in for my first lesson," she says, "my teacher was a bit surprised when I told him that I didn't know anything about jazz. But after all, that's why I was there; I wanted to learn." SMD