Valerie Bolivar is retiring

Valerie Bolivar, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, is retiring! A huge congratulations and thank you to Dr. Bolivar for her many years of service to the School of Public Health.

Many of our Biomedical Sciences students know Bolivar as the first-year mentor in the department. In fact, she has been mentoring students since she first taught undergraduate psychology in the late 1980s. She realized the need for coaching in professional development alongside academic coursework.

Bolivar’s technique involves a lot of listening, a little psychology, and insight that guides each student toward their own decisions. Her motivation is simple: the joy of helping a new student face their problems head-on, then watching them succeed and use the tools they gain to work through their next problem.

Her own journey towards a PhD was not direct. She was the first student in her community to earn a college degree, and spent an extra two years in university to double major in biology and psychology. Between her MS degree and PhD program, she taught undergraduate and graduate courses at St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia for three years. Once she started her PhD program, a rotation project changed her plans from studying child development to mouse behavior and biology. Bolivar’s graduate work with mice laid the foundation for her mouse model research at the Wadsworth Center.

Since coming to the Wadsworth Center in 1996, Bolivar’s research has focused on mouse genetics and behavior. She started by correlating genetic differences with behavioral differences among inbred mouse strains. She is known for her group’s work studying the effects of genetic background on behavioral and neuroanatomical traits in mouse models of brain development and neurodegenerative disorders. Her research helped establish the BTBR inbred mouse strain as a model of autism. The research showed that BTBR mice fail to develop a corpus callosum due a mutation in the Draxin gene. Most recently, Bolivar studied the strain differences that make some mice, but not others, susceptible to early prenatal exposure to Zika virus.

In her research at the Wadsworth Center, Bolivar has mentored over 50 graduate, undergraduate and high school students and has been first-year mentor to over 30 Biomedical Sciences students.

Bolivar leaves behind a generation of better scientists. On behalf of all the students, faculty, and staff at the School of Public Health—congratulations on your retirement, Dr. Bolivar, and thank you for the huge difference you have made in the field! You will always be a part of our SPH family.