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Rebecca Heald

researcher

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ37375565
Source-derived summary

Rebecca W. Heald is an American professor of cell and developmental biology. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In May 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She has published over 120 research articles in peer reviewed journals.

Education and academic appointments

Heald grew up in Greenville, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Hamilton College in upstate New York. She said she was inspired by "Biochemistry Professor, Donna Brown. I barely had a clue about what I was doing, but discovered the joy of pipeting colorless liquids from tube to tube." She received her Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School, where she worked in the laboratory of Frank McKeon. She was a postdoctoral researcher with Eric Karsenti at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. She joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997, and has held the Flora Lamson Hewlett Chair of Biochemistry since 2011. In addition to running her research group, from 2018-2021 she served as a regional associate dean for research administration and from 2021-2025 as co-chair of the department of Molecular and Cell Biology.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Rebecca Heald” is researcher. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Rebecca, Heald and researcher, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2019, 1997, 2011, 2018—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1963-01-01. For this dossier, Rebecca, Heald and researcher is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “researcher” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q37375565. VIAF identifies the subject as 315595489. The Library of Congress control number is n2015027967. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019, 1997, 2011 and 2018.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Rebecca Heald”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Rebecca Heald primary sources, Rebecca Heald archive and Rebecca research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Rebecca Heald”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Rebecca Heald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.