Connie J. Eaves, PhD, OC, a Canadian biologist whose work on hematopoiesis and stem cells provided insights into the biology of leukemia and breast cancer, died March 7, 2024, at the age of 79. She was a Fellow of the AACR Academy.
Born in Ottawa in 1944, Eaves received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Queen’s University in Ontario and her doctorate from the University of Manchester in Great Britain. After postdoctoral work at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto, she took a faculty position at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
She rose to professor in the Department of Medical Genetics of the UBC Faculty of Medicine and professor at the UBC School of Biomedical Engineering. She also held an appointment as distinguished scientist at the Terry Fox Laboratory at BC Cancer.
She was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine in 2022 and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Society in 2021. She received the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award and was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2019 and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1994.
She was elected to the AACR Academy in 2022 in recognition of her “essential contributions to the development of functional methods to quantify and characterize hematopoietic, mammary, and cancer stem cells that are now considered benchmarks in the field, and for co-discovering quiescent malignant stem cells in chronic myeloid leukemia.”
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Connie was my mentor not only during my post-doc in her lab, but also through all the following years. She trained me as a scientist and encouraged me to jump into new challenges as she did to decipher stem cell regulation in such distinct tissues that can be hematopoietic bone marrow and epithelial mammary gland. Talking science with Connie was a real and profound pleasure but inevitably ends to deep questioning of concepts that she was challenging. She was also always requiring to rigorously quantify stem cell function regarless of technicals difficulties. Her conceptualization of complicated mechanism was disarming as so easy for her to formulate and so difficult for us to follow sometimes, but at the end it was always so bright and impacting ! Connie then provided to the scientific community many seminal discoveries that definitely changed our view of stem cell biology and features. She will definitely continue to guide me and all her trainees from the stars where she now belongs.
Connie Eaves was my PhD supervisor and a bright scientist with a luminous mind. Like many of her trainees and post-doctoral fellows around the world I will remember her as a wonderful mentor, always open to novel ideas. She was at the origin of several novel concepts on normal and leukemic stem cells as well as cancer stem cells. Her ideas guided several research projects still ongoing around the world. Everyone who underwent research in Terry Fox Laboratory with Connie, will remember her scientific rigor in the experiments required and in the talks or papers in progress.. while maintaining her infinite kindness and her beautiful smile. She will stay forever in our memories as an exceptional mentor and a wonderful person who shaped the careers of many hematologists and scientists.