JASON WOLFE

JASON WOLFE, 73, professor of biology emeritus, died Dec. 23, 2014. He joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1969 after receiving his BA from Rutgers and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and completing two post-doctoral fellowships at Kings College, University of London, and Johns Hopkins. He taught cell biology, human biology, biology of aging and the elderly, and structural biology at Wesleyan for 39 years.

In his research, Wolfe asked big questions about how reproduction and aging are regulated. With funding from NIH and NSF, he produced an enviable body of work published in the major cell biology journals—always mentoring undergraduates and graduate students with compassion and insight. He led the effort that resulted in Wesleyan’s first Howard Hughes Medical Institute Grant for Undergraduate Life Science Education, establishing a program that has provided decades of support for hundreds of undergraduates. In retirement, he twice offered his popular general education course in human biology and published his last Biology Open research paper in 2014 with four former Wesleyan undergraduate co-authors.

He is survived by his wife, Vera Schwarcz, the Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies, professor of history, as well as three children and five grandchildren.