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Holly A. Ingraham, PhD

Herzstein Endowed Professor
UCSF
San Francisco, CA, United States

Speaker: Holly A. Ingraham, Ph.D., is the Herzstein Endowed Professor at UCSF. Her research focuses on sex differences and hormone-responsive nodes in the brain that regulate female physiology. Through question-driven basic science, Ingraham seeks to uncover how females adapt to hormonal fluctuations throughout their lives. Ingraham has reframed and catalyzed progress in women’s health by defining new hormone-signaling pathways beyond those traditionally associated with reproductive tissues. Her lab recently discovered a brain-derived hormone produced in the female brain that helps offset bone degradation during lactation. Her high-impact studies have been featured in the NYT (10/26/21) and the NIH Director’s Blog (8/1/24) and have led to numerous awards, distinguished lectureships, and public forums on women’s health. She is a founder of a biotech venture focused on alleviating age-related frailty and skeletal decline. Ingraham is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Ingraham’s innovative and multidimensional work has illuminated basic molecular processes that control endocrine development and pathways that govern female physiology. During her postdoctoral work in the Rosenfeld lab at UCSD, she was the driving force behind the identification of Pit-1, one of the first tissue-specific regulators and a founding member of the POU transcription factor family. At UCSF, Ingraham demonstrated that the nuclear receptor SF-1 is a key developmental factor in establishing gonadal sex differences by regulating the peptide hormone anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH). Using biochemical and structural studies, her lab identified phospholipids as ligands for SF-1 (LRH-1) and demonstrated the in vivo impact of SUMOylation on receptor activity during endocrine organ development. Ingraham’s recent studies that probe basic mechanisms controlling brain-body and sex-specific physiology provide a framework for closing the knowledge gap in female physiology and open the door to new therapeutic strategies for women’s health.

Disclosure information not submitted.

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