Patricia Vary

Dr. Patricia Vary grew up in southern Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. She attended Texas Christian University (TCU) as a Medical Technology major. After her sophomore year, she began research in the microbiology laboratory of Sanders T. Lyles, working on her virulence factors of Staphylococcus aureus. By her junior year, Patricia had decided to go into microbiology, but had no money for tuition to finish. She therefore stayed in the MedTech program, completing her senior year in hospital training because it paid for her tuition. It was Dr. Lyles who persuaded Patricia to try for both the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) predoctoral fellowships. After graduating summa cum laude, Patricia was awarded the NSF fellowship and entered graduate school at TCU. She earned an M.S. in Microbiology. She began her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, working on methane-oxidizing bacteria in the lab of Marvin Johnson. After her Ph.D. prelims, she was married and wrote her research as another M.S. She followed her new husband to Stanford University, where she completed a Ph.D. in Microbial Genetics working with the motility and chemotactic genes of Salmonella Typhimurium in Bruce Stocker’s lab. Her entire graduate education was financed by fellowships. Patricia’s husband obtained a position at the University of Illinois medical school in Chicago, and Pat, who was pregnant when she finished her orals, stayed home most of the next eight years raising her two children. She worked part-time for four years supervising the Microbiology labs at NIU, teaching a Microbial Genetics course, and teaching part of a Microbiology course. When her youngest child started first grade, she applied to a position for a Microbial Geneticist at NIU and was chosen. In her 30 years in the Department of Biology at NIU, Patricia was awarded several NSF and NIH grants; taught freshmen through graduate courses, including a ‘Women in Science’ course; pursued the development of the genetics of industrial bacterium, Bacillus megaterium; and obtained two patents. Pat also has a licensing agreement with Abbott Laboratories, where one of her lab’s strains is still producing the HIV virus antigen used for their AIDS diagnostics. In addition, she completed two sabbaticals at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Pat trained many undergraduate, M.S., and Ph.D. students. She became a Distinguished Research Professor, was chair of the department for four years, and collaborated with the labs of Dieter Jahn in Germany and Jacques Ravel at the Institute for Gnome Sciences at University of Maryland, Baltimore, to sequence the genomes of two B megaterium strains. About 95 percent of all the annotation was done at NIU by bioinformatics students and faculty. Dr. Vary has many outside interests including music, politics, travel, reading, cycling, and gardening. She has played in the Kishwaukee Symphony for over 24 years, directed adult and children’s choirs at her church, and sung in a women’s chorus for many years. In retirement, she served on the DeKalb County Board for 10 years. Her special joy is her two children, Catherine and Jay, their spouses, and five grandchildren. She established this scholarship with her two children because she has experienced some of the special circumstances many young people find themselves in, especially women, trying to complete a degree.