Pinky Drosten Kushner ’59, PhD

Pinky Drosten Kushner was born in St. Louis and spent her adolescence in various parts of the world including Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Cuba before her family settled in Chattanooga when she was 13. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Washington University, St. Louis, in comparative literature. At Wash U, she also became involved in social activism. She was a founding member of the student chapter of the NAACP and was in on the first lunch counter sit-ins in segregated St. Louis. Sit-ins and other similar actions around the country led to the 1963 Civil Rights Act.

While simultaneously raising a family, she continued her education, with a second BA in chemistry in 1974 and a PhD from the University of Oregon in 1979, along with her husband, he in molecular biology, she in neuroscience. They both postdoc-ed at the University of California, San Francisco, and then both had labs in San Francisco. She headed the research lab at the ALS and Neuromuscular Research Foundation, studying ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

After years of publicly funded and well recognized research and teaching in neurological sciences, she returned to social activism. She served as an executive committee member of the San Francisco chapter of the Sierra Club. She started several neighbor to neighbor groups, one called Backyard Natives, another Friends of Gibson Creek, and so on. She works on both regional and local planning issues, encouraging programs that expand nature within the urban environment.

Her daughter is Rachel Kushner, whose newest novel is Creation Lake, just published by Scribner. Her son is Jake Alden Kushner, MD, a pediatric endocrinologist and biotech entrepreneur CEO.