Heidi Dvinge, PhD, assistant professor of Biomolecular Chemistry and a member of the Carbone Cancer Center, passed away on September 20, 2019. With great sorrow over the loss of a brilliant young scientist, colleague, mentor and friend, we honor her memory and her scholarly work.
Dvinge had been a member of the School of Medicine and Public Health faculty for just over two years. Her research program was dedicated to understanding how misregulation of RNA processing contributes to disease, and how changes that occur in RNA splicing processes in cancer cells might be exploited to allow new therapeutic approaches.
After she earned her combined bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, she completed her PhD in computational biology at the University of Cambridge in the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute. Prior to joining our faculty, Dvinge was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.
Her research interwove the disciplines of molecular biology, biochemistry, bioinformatics and oncology with a combination of precision and creativity. The scientific world took note of Dvinge’s brilliance: Over the past five years alone, her publications have been cited more than 4,600 times.
She was a skilled mentor to undergraduates and graduate students, serving as a faculty mentor in the Integrated Program in Biochemistry, the Graduate Program in Cellular and Molecular Biology, and the Genetics PhD program.
We will share memorial information on this page when it is available. Members of the UW–Madison community and beyond are welcome to share tributes to Heidi in the comments below. You can also email us your memories and we’ll add them to the tribute.
Grief counseling resources at UW–Madison:
For faculty and staff, counseling is available through the Employee Assistance Office. The office also partners with LifeMatters, which provides 24/7 assistance.
