Rebecca Heald PhD

Rebecca Heald is a cell biologist recognized for her work on cell division and biological size control. In particular, she is known for her use of cytoplasmic extracts prepared from eggs of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis to study how the mitotic spindle forms and scales to different sizes. Heald was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Greenville, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York with a degree in Chemistry in 1985 and from Harvard Medical School in 1993 with a Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. She was awarded the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2006 and was elected as a fellow of the American Society for Cell biology in 2017. Heald is known for postdoctoral mentoring and for promoting diversity and inclusion in the life sciences and was awarded the Leon K. Henkin Citation for Distinguished Service at UC Berkeley in 2019. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.