Ellen Rothenberg (scientist)

In 1979, Rothenberg was appointed to the faculty at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where she spent three years before moving to the California Institute of Technology. Rothenberg investigates the molecular mechanisms that underpin lineage selection. This includes the processes that determine the differentiation of hematopoietic stem cells into T cells. There are several steps to this process, in which the multi-potentiality of stem cells are reduced whilst the T-cell specific differentiation events start.

Rothenberg describes her upbringing as "sex-blind". She credits her parents with giving her "this heroic sense of one's potential" and says her father "taught [her] advanced math and logic to the point that [she] got in trouble with [her] teachers". As a child, Rothenberg originally wanted to become a physicist, but her high school biology classes inspired her to pursue biochemistry. Her high school teachers taught her about protein structure and how their structures confer biological function. While Rothenberg was an undergraduate student at Harvard University, her tutor, Boris Magasanik, inspired her to work on gene regulation. After earning her bachelor's degree, Rothenberg started a MD–PhD program offered jointly by Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She eventually dropped the MD but continued, at MIT, her PhD research with David Baltimore. She was the first to synthesise in vitro the genome of a retrovirus. She completed her doctoral research in the Department of Biology and Center for Cancer Research in 1977. Rothenberg was a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow with Edward Boyse at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Ellen V. Rothenberg (born 1952) is an American biologist who is a Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Technology. She investigates the molecular mechanisms that underpin lineage choice. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.