Pamela J. Fink
Pamela J. Fink is an immunologist and professor emerita at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She was the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Immunology, from 2013 to 2018. In 2019 she became a Distinguished Fellow of the American Association of Immunologists and received the AAI Lifetime Achievement Award for her long and influential career.
She was born in Dodge City, Kansas, and grew up in Kansas City, where she attended public schools and studied ballet. She earned a Bachelor of Science at Indiana University, where she worked on genetics and operon control in bacteriophage lambda with John Richardson. She earned her Ph.D. in Biology at MIT in 1981, working with Michael J. Bevan on T cells and how they recognize antigens.
Her training included postdoctoral positions at Stanford University with Irving Weissman and at UC San Diego with Stephen Hedrick, followed by two years at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation with Per Peterson. She married Michael J. Bevan in 1985.
In 1990 Fink joined the University of Washington, where she built her career in immunology. She began with developmental biology and became fascinated by how T cells learn to recognize foreign antigens during their development in the thymus. Through experiments that transplanted thymus tissue between animals, she showed that T cells learn from their environment, not just from their genes.
Her later work used molecular biology tools to study T cell structure and function. She started her own lab at the University of Washington and studied how peripheral T cells mature after leaving the thymus. She found that recently formed T cells behave differently from mature T cells, and that the balance of immature and mature T cells changes with age. These findings have important implications for immunology and medical treatment.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 09:09 (CET).