Biography
Dr. Rifkind was born and raised in New York City. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she majored in philosophy. She returned to NY for medical school and received her M.D. from NYU Medical School. After residency training in internal medicine at Bellevue Hospital, she spent three years at the NIH as a Clinical Associate in the Endocrine Division of the Cancer Institute, assigned to the Institute of Child Health, where she began her research career and where she participated in the discovery that gonadotropin secretion occurs in early childhood, substantially before puberty. She returned to NY for further post-doctoral training at the Rockefeller University in the laboratory of Dr. Attallah Kappas, where she was introduced to the fields of heme biosynthesis and drug metabolism, cytochrome P450 and dioxin toxicity. These became her long term research interests, continuing to the present. Dr. Rifkind joined the Cornell faculty in 1970, first in the departments of Pediatrics and Medicine and then in Pharmacology, where she became professor in 1983. She served as chairman of the General Faculty Council at WMC from 1984 to 1986. She has served on and led several NIH study sections and advisory boards, been an Associate Editor of Drug Metabolism and Disposition and has served on other journal editorial boards. She teaches medical and graduate students and has been running a lab doing research on dioxin toxicity, CYP1A and P450 dependent arachidonic metabolism, which has received new continuing RO1 NIH funding for five years as of 9/07.
