Bilingual:
College French, Scientist’s Latin

Recent CUNY Ph.D. Patricia Nadosy with Lehman College professor of biological sciences Dominick Basile, examining a fig plant and some rosemary.

About 17 years ago, Patricia Nadosy planted a few herbs in her windowbox. She was thinking along the lines of some more
flavorsome meals for her growing family—and of a nice, relaxing focus to get her mind off her day job. She was an options trader on Wall Street. Little did she realize then how green her thumb was going to get—or how large Rosmarinus officinalis would loom in her life.

For Nadosy, a Barnard College alumna and a member of its board of trustees, became on May 30 one of the most recent students to earn a CUNY doctorate in biological sciences, with a specialization in plants. In order to enter the program, she had to return to Barnard to recreate an undergraduate major in biology (her first major was French). Then she had to balance part-time graduate study with a full-time career. “Returning to college at age 40 was exciting for me and my three daughters—we spent many nights helping each other with homework!”

Nadosy is looking forward to a new career in natural products research, most likely for a pharmaceutical company. In fact, her work has already broken new ground.

In her dissertation, “Anti-oxidant Diterpenoids from Callus and Regenerated Plants,” Nadosy was able to report the first successful extraction of anti-oxidant compounds from undifferentiated rosemary (aka Rosmarinus officinalis) cells that had been grown in tissue culture.

Anti-oxidants have been shown to prevent cancer in animals, and rosemary’s well- documented anti-inflammatory qualities may also play a role in treating Alzheimer’s disease and coronary disease. Over the past few years, evidence has been building on the potential health benefits of herbs—and rosemary in particular.

Oh, and her French major has come in very handy. Much of the scientific literature on rosemary is in that language, since the Nestlé com-pany, based in Switzerland has sponsored much research on the plant.