After completing the third grade in the small town where her grandmother lived, her parents brought her back home, where she attended grades four through seven in the local two-room schoolhouse. Although their parents had a car, Dubocovich and her sister rode to school each day in a horsedrawn buggy, joined by other buggies carrying children from the neighboring farms. “My sister drove, and I opened all the gates,” Dubocovich recalls with a laugh. “It was fun.” Once at school, all the students were taught by one teacher. “So there was a lot of selfstudy. I remember doing the math myself—going through the exercises in the book.” In high school Dubocovich excelled in math and science. Despite this, her teachers and family friends would ask: “Why aren’t you learning to type so you can be a secretary? You’re only going to raise a family, so what do you want with this education?” But Dubocovich knew what she wanted. In high school, she says, she “fell in love with chemistry and physics” and decided she wanted to go on to college. Education in Argentina is free, and over the next decade Dubocovich completed a bachelor of science degree—“the equivalent of a good MS in the United States”—and a doctorate, with a focus on pharmacology, at the University of Buenos Aires School of Natural and Exact Sciences. For a time she lived with her aunt and uncle, whose daughter, a few years older than she, had completed her BS in chemical biology and was working in a laboratory at an area hospital. Her cousin was well connected and opened doors for Dubocovich, eventually helping her to land a position in the laboratory of Solomon Langer, MD, who mentored her through her doctorate and into the early stages of her career. “Sol was internationally known and would go abroad a lot,” Dubocovich says. “He was a really good mentor, too—one of those people who would come into the lab each morning and afternoon and go over the experimental design with me and discuss my findings.”
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“Coming to UB has given me the opportunity to contribute to the education and the development of junior scientists as well as to create programs that are attracting and mentoring these super-talented students from all walks of life, which is what diversity is about.” —Margarita Dubocovich, PhD
Dubocovich completed fellowships at the National Research Council and began earning about $40 a month. “I preferred working in the lab and being happy at the end of the day, rather than being unhappy somewhere else and having a lot of money,” she explains. “At that time,” she adds, “most scientists in Argentina were women. Men couldn’t afford it because if they had a family, they couldn’t support them on the salaries, which were very, very low.”
A PROPHECY FULFILLED In 1977, Dubocovich moved to France to work for Langer when he took a job with Synthelabo (after a brief stay in England, where they both worked for Wellcome Research Laboratories). She lived in Paris for three years, learned French and traveled the world. “It was a fantastic experience. I never imagined that I was going to do something like that, and it made me recall what my grandmother had said.” In 1980, Dubocovich attended a meeting in San Francisco, which led to her being recruited to the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. She worked there for two years before being recruited to Northwestern by its chair of pharmacology, Toshio Narahashi, PhD, renowned for his discovery of the nerve blocking action of tetrodotoxin and credited with establishing the modern field of ion channel pharmacology. In the ensuing decades, Dubocovich thrived as a researcher, cementing her reputation as the world’s foremost authority on the brain hormone melatonin and the regulation of melatonin receptors. Her work has significantly broadened understanding of melatonin’s impact on circadian rhythms, sleep disorders and
UB MEDICINE
depression. She also is credited with establishing the pharmacological characteristics and function of melatonin receptor types, which revolutionized the field, as well as pioneering the discovery of prototype melatonin receptors agonist and antagonist agents.
AT HOME AT UB Dubocovich says she couldn’t be more pleased with her tenure at UB and her life in Buffalo. She and her husband have settled in a new home they love and have re-established their lives here. “Coming to UB has given me the opportunity to contribute to the education and the development of junior scientists as well as to create programs that are attracting and mentoring these super-talented students from all walks of life, which is what diversity is about,” she says. Dubocovich credits Dean Cain with helping to make this happen at UB as part of his effort to position the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences as a lead player in the establishment of the region’s first comprehensive academic health center. “Dean Cain is an unbelievable leader,” she says. “He is one of the reasons why I accepted the job here. He knows what a researcher needs and he facilitates getting it, and he knows what chairs need and supports activities that are essential to becoming excellent and even pre-eminent. The changes that he has made here since I came have been amazing.” In recent years, Dubocovich has only gained momentum. She helped UB win a $1.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund the education of 20 new biomedical and behavioral scientists from