Early Life and Education
Rolf was born in New York in the Bronx on May 19, 1896. An only child, her father, Bernard Rolf was a civil engineer who built docks and piers on the east coast.
Rolf attended Barnard College and graduated in 1916 with a bachelors degree in the middle of World War I. At the time, young men were fighting in Europe and she was given a rare opportunity for a woman to work as a researcher at the Rockefeller Institute under the supervision of Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene. Levene was then the head of the biochemical laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research.
Rolf's work at the Rockefeller Institute later became her PhD at Columbia University which she obtained in biochemistry from Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1920. Her dissertation was titled "Three Contributions to the Chemistry of the Unsaturated Phosphatides". The topic of her research was phosphatides.
Read more about this topic: Ida Pauline Rolf
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