Wendy had a calm and reticent demeanor that belied the enormous impact she had on the field of immunology and on the hundreds of colleagues and friends who knew and admired her. To learn more about her formative years, I encourage you to read a recent interview in which she commented on her development into an immunologist (https://www.the-scientist.com/profile/t-cell-tracker--a-profile-of-wendy-havran-65249). I will focus on her many years at Scripps and what she meant to those who knew her as a colleague and friend.
Wendy was the first woman ever recruited to our department. Those of us who came before were begrudgingly tolerated because the department wanted to recruit our spouse or significant other. Fortunately, when Per Peterson became chair of our department, he put an end to that nonsense and just looked around for the best candidates. At the time, Wendy Havran held a prestigious Lucille P. Markey Scholarship and had just completed a highly successful postdoctoral position with Jim Allison at the University of California, Berkeley. She already had several first-author Nature papers under her belt and had made several influential discoveries. She and Jim demonstrated that double-positive CD4+CD8+ thymocytes were precursors to mature single-positive CD4 and CD8 T cells. But it was another discovery, involving a different type of T cell, that would become the focus of Wendy’s career. She produced a monoclonal antibody that detected γδ T cell receptors and, with it, found that an unusual population of dendritic-cell-like epithelial cells in the skin were γδ T cells. Even more surprising, the cells expressed an invariant γδ T cell receptor. How did they get there? What were they doing and how did they do it? This was the stuff careers are built on, and she proceeded to do just that. Along the way, she helped to build an international community of investigators who would meet each year at the γδ T Cell Conference.
