Center for the literary arts in New York State
A MOTHER’S DAY SPECIAL:
SEEKING WORK-LIFE BALANCE IN SCIENCE AND MOTHERHOOD
Marlene Belfort
4:30 p.m. Thursday, May 8, 2025
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room Campus Center West
1400 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12222
Marlene Belfort, renowned biochemist and UAlbany professor, is the author of a new memoir, Mommy, Can Boys Also be Doctors? A Message to Young Scientists and Other Humans (May 2025).
The memoir explores the often-daunting struggle to find happiness, meaning, and simply enough minutes in the day to be a leader in scientific research and — at the same time — a loving mother to three sons. She is extremely candid about her difficulties, including two lengthy bouts of major, late-onset depression, one in her fifties, the other in her seventies.
Dr. Belfort is a pioneer in the study of introns— non-coding segments that make up 25% of the human genome. Once dismissed as “junk” DNA, introns have been discovered to have a wide range of important functions. Belfort is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cosponsored by UAlbany’s RNA Institute.
From the Albany Times Union
Grondahl: From South Africa’s Cape Town, an improbable journey
By Paul Grondahl, published February 25, 2020
Georges and Marlene Belfort, husband-and-wife scientists who live in Slingerlands, stood in the Pinelands Jewish Cemetery in Cape Town, South Africa and pondered the imponderable.
Theirs was a journey of 8,000 miles, completed against incalculable odds, an enduring love story set against a complicated history of religious persecution and racial oppression.
They had come to the cemetery with their two sons to pay tribute to the couple’s iron-willed mothers. Both women had managed to escape the Nazi Holocaust and built lives in Cape Town's large Jewish enclave, enduring divorce, financial hardship and the suicide of a husband.
The Belforts traveled in December to their hometown to accept rare dual honorary degrees from their alma mater, the University of Cape Town. Both were overwhelmed by the unexpected symmetry.
They had met as teenagers. She thought he was ruggedly handsome. He was smitten by the fact that she was studying on the beach for her trigonometry finals. He was five years older and was later hired as her mathematics tutor. A romance blossomed. Read more
Photo captions:
Marlene and Georges Belfort in 1967 in Las Vegas, shortly before their wedding in Cape Town.
Marlene Belfort, center, walks with her two sons, Gabi, left, and David after visiting their grandparents’ graves in Pinelands Jewish Cemetery in Cape Town, South Africa in December 2019.
