Mathilde Krim

Mathilde Krim, born Mathilde Galland in Como, Italy, in 1926, was a medical researcher and the founding chairman of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, known as amfAR. She grew up near Geneva and in 1953 became the first woman to receive a doctorate in biology from the University of Geneva. She did research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, then at Cornell Medical College and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York, where she directed the interferon laboratory from 1981 to 1985. Soon after the first AIDS cases were reported in 1981 she dedicated herself to public awareness of the disease, established the AIDS Medical Foundation in 1983, and co-founded amfAR with Elizabeth Taylor. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000 and died in New York in 2018.