Today, Dehesh is the director of UCR’s Institute for Integrative Genome Biology and a distinguished professor of molecular biochemistry. Her list of achievements has only grown since then. Landing in Germany, she became the only foreigner and only woman at the time to obtain a tenure-track position at Kiel University. In 1980, just as the Iran-Iraq War began, she “heard the bells of revolution” and fled the country. All women in Iran with medical or doctoral degrees would soon be required to serve in the military. However, soon after accepting the position, Dehesh was banned from traveling abroad. She then returned to Iran for an assistant professorship at the National University in Tehran.
Motivated to find potential solutions to this problem, Dehesh earned a doctorate in plant stress biology at the University of Sussex in England in 1977. Nevertheless, she persisted - and countless numbers of female scientists, particularly those in the Middle East, are better off today because of it.įrom a young age, Dehesh held an interest in plants that grow in soils with “unimaginably high salt content.” High salinity can cut the growth of crop plants by as much as 50% and is made worse by climate change. She knew leaving Iran would not be easy, and she’d have to build her life again from scratch. UCR MAGAZINE (SPRING 2023) - Katayoon “Katie” Dehesh once had to make an impossible choice: leave her Persian homeland forever to pursue a life of science or stay near family and give up her passion for independence.
0 kommentar(er)
