In Memoriam: Shoshana Levy, 1939-2022

Shoshana Levy, a long-time faculty member at Stanford Medical School, died late last year. She was 83 years old and had suffered from cancer.

A native of Israel, Levy served in the Israeli Defense Force from 1957 to 1959. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from Tel Aviv University and a master’s degree in biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Later, she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Tufts University in Massachusetts.

Dr. Levy first came to Stanford as a research fellow for a year in 1972 and returned as a senior research associate from 1975 to 1979. She then left for a position at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. She returned to Stanford as a senior research scientist in 1984. In 1994, she was appointed professor of medicine in the oncology division — a position she held until her death.

In 1990, Dr. Levy’s research identified a new family of proteins called tetraspanins that span the cell membrane and affect how cells send and receive signals to interact with other cells, move and divide. Since their discovery, they’ve been implicated in cancer metastasis and may be a target for cancer therapies. She presented her latest research on their role in cancer metastasis at a conference in Prague in September 2022.

From 1995 to 2000, Dr. Levy was an associate editor for the Journal of Immunology. She served as the chair of the Katharine McCormick Advanced Postdoctoral Scholarship to Support Women in Academic Medicine committee and was a mentor for the Palo Alto chapter of the Association for Women in Science for many years.