Clare Woodward was born in Houston, Texas, three days before the United States entered WWII, too young to be conscious of the war’s devastation but right on time for the post-war aftermath. Like so many people at the time, her parents, a high school teacher and an automobile dealer/salesman, were passionately engaged in a public reckoning of the great depression and the no-longer glossed-over horrors of genocide and racism. The energy of public debate and the optimism of increased social mobility raised issues of public education, human rights, and economic justice. The mid-1950s brought new career outlooks for many high school students so that, to Woodward, her mother’s scenario of science as a professional goal for girls was perfectly logical. It seemed confirmed by national initiatives to recruit more students into science, and Woodward was among the junior-year students on a field trip to introduce high schoolers to Rice University science majors, who shared their college experiences with the high school students. Woodward recalls “no one mentioned a preference for male/female scientists, and I thought the life of a college science student looked fun and perfectly doable. The organizers also advertised various scholarships for college and higher degree programs, which increased the plausibility of becoming a scientist. The clear message that reached me: if I do well in school I can be a scientist. That optimism, reinforced by my college experience, carried me up to my first day of graduate school when the reality of women in science took on other, more ominous aspects.”
After high school, Woodward received a scholarship to Smith College, after volunteer college recruiters visited her high school and offered an appealing option of a single application for a student seeking admission and tuition grants from seven well respected liberal arts women’s colleges in the northeastern United States. At age 17, Woodward left home at midnight on a red-eye flight headed for the east coast. She recalls, “Smith College was liberating, stimulating and confidence building; everything about it reinforced the goal of educating women for scholarship and leadership. Second only to my very supportive parents, my good fortune of attending Smith was formative.” Woodward graduated in 1963 with a major in chemistry, recalling that, “while today I’m amused that Smith’s weekday curfew was 9 pm, then I was delighted that a science major could obtain special permission to sign-in later if she was tending a lab experiment. During sophomore year, I found a student job doing research in the organic chemistry lab of an excellent mentor, Professor Milton Soffer; there I realized that the lab was the place for me. I couldn’t believe I actually got paid for such engaging and fun work! That summer I stayed on at Smith to work in the Soffer lab and rented a faculty member’s house with 3 women graduate students in the chemistry department. The summer after junior year I was accepted for a student research job in a lab at Rice University in Houston; the following summer, three weeks after my commencement ceremony in 1963, I entered graduate school and received my Ph. D. 4 years later.”
“My first day in graduate school, in the one-on-one meeting every incoming student had with the departmental graduate advisor, his first statement to me was ‘you should quit right now because no man wants to marry an over-credentialed woman.’ Stunned into silence, I said sternly to myself ‘do-not-cry but do exit this room soon and with the minimum acceptable interaction with this guy’. In later years, the same advisor went on to explain at length how unreasonable it was for females to expect a university faculty position because their mere presence in the room destroyed the collegial esprit among male faculty who after all had to get along with each other for decades. Luckily, by then I had discovered that the sociological complexity of university science also included many men who were very supportive to women in science. And I promised myself that, like them, I would work for equal inclusion of women and all ethnic groups in science.”
Woodward moved to the University of Minnesota in 1967, with her husband, Val Woodward a professor of genetics and cell biology. Her postdoctoral work in the University of Minnesota chemistry department was in the lab of Professor Rufus Lumry, an insightful scientist who dedicated his life to studying the relationship between the physical chemical properties of proteins and their biological function. He introduced Woodward to the study of protein dynamics using the method of hydrogen isotope exchange, a field she pursued her entire career. An early leader in protein folding science, K. Linderstrøm-Lang, had established hydrogen isotope exchange in proteins as a method to examine the internal dynamics and flexibility of proteins. Along with Aase Hvidt and other associates in his lab in Denmark, Linderstrøm-Lang developed in the late 1950s the canonical analysis of protein hydrogen isotope exchange data. They showed that in folded proteins peptide amide -NH groups which are buried and internally H-bonded nevertheless exchange hydrogen isotope with deuterated solvent water and they concluded, therefore, that native folded proteins are internally flexible. The method opened a new observation window onto internal protein fluctuations that mediate hydrogen isotope exchange.”
Woodward joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1971, as the first tenure-track, female Assistant Professor hired by the College of Biological Sciences. She continued her work with hydrogen exchange in proteins and was promoted to full professor in 1981 in the Department of Biochemistry. She received multiple teaching awards from committees at the University, the state, and the national levels. Of her research, Woodward said: “I was fascinated by soluble globular proteins and how their physical chemical aspects determine their complex biological functions, the most essential being that they fold at all. While a protein’s folded ‘native’ state is compact and tightly packed internally, it is also conformationally dynamic, as shown by Linderstrøm-Lang and Hvidt. It was significant to me that the solvent-amide hydrogen exchange rates of individual -NH hydrogens vary widely in a single protein, over the msec to hour time scales, and so are a measure of the variation within the protein of local flexibility and of the resultant average, local chemical environments of each -NH. To me, this means that not only do folded proteins sequester away from the aqueous milieu a wide range of chemical microenvironments that drive folding and favor special reactivities of the component moieties that bind and/or covalently alter ligands, but also that these microenvironments co-evolve with biological function. To understand the microenvironments reported by hydrogen exchange rates, and their variation within a protein we need to determine, for each -NH observed, whether it undergoes exchange from transient conformations that result from very small local fluctuations of native-like structure, from larger collective fluctuations of a partially native structure, or from global fluctuations involved in cooperative unfolding transitions. I worked to develop experimental conditions that distinguish among these.”
To the question of ‘which scientists most influenced your work?’ she recalled that “I was most influenced by the work of protein chemists John Edsall, K. Linderstrøm-Lang, Aase Hvidt, Rufus Lumry, and Gregorio Weber, the first two of whom I never had the pleasure of meeting. I was pleasantly surprised and deeply heartened when I first realized that Aase Hvidt was a woman, and the only woman in protein science whose research was recognized and prominently cited by the people in my field at the time. I was honored to meet her in Denmark just before her retirement in the 1980s.”
Woodward was President of the Biophysical Society in 1997 and appointed a Fellow of the Society in 2001. She attended her first annual meeting of the Biophysical Society in 1969, and most of the meetings since. She remembers “When I met other scientists at the Biophysical Society’s national meetings, I felt at home in science for the first time since college. I was heartened and energized by meeting the women and men who first organized the Society’s Committee on Professional Opportunities for Women (CPOW), which was formed in the 1970s and is still an effective and active committee of the Biophysical Society. I continue to be encouraged by the presentations and gatherings of CPOW and by its guiding principle that while its activities help women, in particular, accomplish their scientific goals, at the same time they also help all young scientists, both women, and men.”
Clare Woodward is now retired, a Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota, and she lives in Austin, Texas. She keeps abreast of biophysics, attends the annual meetings of the Biophysical Society, and actively mentors and gives collegial feedback to young scientists about their own work.