Nina F. Schor
Nina Felice Schor (née Tabachnik) is an American physician-scientist and pediatric neurologist. Born in Bayside, Queens, she was the first woman to win the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1972. She earned a B.S. from Yale in 1975, a Ph.D. in Medical Biochemistry from Rockefeller University in 1980 (with Anthony Cerami), and an M.D. from Cornell in 1981. She trained in pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and in child neurology at Harvard, and she did a postdoctoral work with Manfred Karnofsky, starting her research on neuroblastoma.
Schor spent about 20 years at the University of Pittsburgh, where she became the Carol Ann Craumer Professor of Pediatric Research, led the Division of Child Neurology, and served as Associate Dean for Medical Student Research. She helped introduce new learning methods and started the Scholarly Project Initiative for medical students. She also played a key role in developing the Golisano Children’s Hospital and the Levine Autism Center at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
In 2006 she became the William H. Eilinger Chair of the Department of Pediatrics and Pediatrician-in-Chief of the Golisano Children’s Hospital at the University of Rochester, a post she held until January 2018. She then joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as Deputy Director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). She served as Acting Scientific Director of NINDS in 2021 and, starting August 1, 2022, became Acting Director of the NIH Intramural Research Program, and later the IRP Director on November 6, 2022, a role she held through September 2025. Schor has been continuously funded by NIH for 27 years.
She was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2024 and became a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology in 2016. In her personal life, she married Robert Hyllel Schor in 1984, who is a neurophysiology professor at Rockefeller University.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:29 (CET).