About Her Life
Judith Klinman was born Judith Pollack in 1941. While growing up in Philadelphia, she realized early on that she was interested in science. She always excelled at school, but her family was not wealthy and her parents weren't sure they could afford to pay for college. Wanting to study chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, she earned a partial scholarship and convinced her parents to let her enroll. Her mother went to work to help pay the costs not covered by the scholarship.

Judith graduated and made plans for graduate school. A friend recommended she apply to Harvard, but she didn't feel confident enough, even though she'd just graduated second in her class from Penn, an Ivy League school. Instead she applied to New York University and was accepted. There she met Norman Klinman, and they married in 1963.

Judith and her husband soon transferred together to the University of Pennsylvania to finish their doctorates. While a graduate student, Judith gave birth to their first son. When Norman finished his Ph.D. in 1965, he took a job at the Weizman Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Judith completed her Ph.D. in physical-organic chemistry in 1966 and also found postdoctoral work at the Weizman Institute. There she studied the way different isotopes of the same element behave in certain chemical reactions in the human body. After 16 months at the institute, she joined her husband briefly in London, where he had accepted a research position at University College. She was allowed to do research while there, but unlike her husband, she didn't get paid for her work.

Returning to the United States, Klinman joined the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, where she was a research scientist from 1968 to 1978. In 1978 she became the first woman professor in the chemistry department of the University of California, Berkeley, where she continues to do research on enzymes today. Commenting on how things have progressed for women in the sciences, she has said, "I look at the young women today, and I am so in awe of the changes that have taken place."