User:Valeria.depaiva/Aída Hassón-Voloch

Aída Hassón-Voloch Rio de Janeiro, November 28, 1922 - 2007, was a Brazilian chemist and biophysicist. Daughter of Jewish immigrants from Rhodes, she was a commander of the National Order of Scientific Merit in 2000 and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Biography
Aída was born in the neighborhood of Tijuca, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in 1922. Her parents were Jewish immigrants, coming from the Mediterranean region of Rhodes, fleeing poverty, in 1905. Her mother's family arrived in Brazil first, later her father arrived on his own, going to Argentina next. Optician trained in Egypt, her father got a job at the company Lutz Ferrando. He proposed to Aída's mother and they moved to Argentina shortly afterwards. Her mother was a typical housewife and did not work outside the home. The couple had two sons and two daughters and at the mother's insistence, the couple returned to Rio de Janeiro, where four more daughters were born, including Aída. One of her brothers died of botulism at the age of ten.

Her father was a supporter of female education and wished that his daughters had academic training, but only Aída sought university education. Neither her family nor her husband, the merchant Jacob Voloch, whom he married in 1964, opposed her scientific career.

Career
Aída's interest in chemistry started at Aldridge College, where Aída had an excellent teacher. In 1940, she took the entrance examination for the National School of Chemistry, at the University of Brazil, now the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), entering the following year and graduating in 1944. Her intention was to be an industrial chemist, but there were few jobs in the field at the time, especially for women. After graduating, she did some unpaid internships, one in Mineral Production with Austrian professor Fritz Feigl, one of the exponents of 20th century analytical chemistry.

Aída got an internship at the National Institute of Technology, in the Organic Chemistry Division, where she stayed for a short period. When almost losing interest in Chemistry, in 1947 she met an acquaintance of her father's on a ship. It was Carlos Chagas Filho, who invited her to do an internship in biophysics at the newly created institute at the University of Brazil. The temporary unpaid internship became a proper scientific career, where she would become an internationally known researcher and professor in the following years. With José Moura Gonçalves, a biochemist from Minas Gerais, Aída learned the technique of electrophoresis and wrote the first work on paperchromatography in 1950. In 1952, she went tostudy in Europe, with a grant from CNPq. She attended Roger Acher's biochemistry laboratory at the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Paris for a short period. Then he went to the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, with a grant from the British Council, where she worked with Frederick Sanger, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1958 and in 1980. In 1953, already back in Brazil, she replaced José Moura Gonçalves as head of the electrophoresis laboratory and started her own line of research, based on electric fish as an animal model, studying the isolation of the nicotinic acetylcholin e receptor. Studying this theme, in addition to biophysical and biochemical aspects of neuromuscular transmission, Aída published more than 60 articles in several international journals, related to her main areas of activity: macromolecule chemistry, molecular biophysics, metabolism, bioenergetics and enzymes.

In 1952, she began teaching at the Institute of Biophysics and then at graduate school in 1962, until her retirement in 1994. Between 1972 and 1992, she taught molecular biophysics at the Faculty of Medicine of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. With the assistance of the Fulbright Foundation, she studied at New York University in 1958. In 1960, with a CNPq grant, she went to Paris to study at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique. Her doctorate would be at the Biophysics Institute itself, in 1964. In the same year, she became an adjunct professor at the Biophysics Institute. Between 1953 and 1965, she headed the Biophysics institute's electrophoresis laboratory, leading it between 1969 and 1992.

In 1960 she became a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and in 2000, a commander of the National Order of Scientific Merit.

Death
In 1999, her name was given to the biological physicochemical laboratory of the Institute of Biophysics. Aída retired in 1994 and died in 2007, at the age of 85, in the city of Teresópolis, Estado do Rio de Janeiro.

