Helen F. Cserr papers (Ms.2018.004)

Biographical/Historical Note

Helen FitzGerald Cserr was born on June 23, 1937, in Boston, Massachusetts. She married Robert Cserr and the two had one daughter, Ruth Cserr. Ruth later donated Helen's papers and a posthumous oral history about her mother to the Pembroke Center Archive in 2018.

Helen Cserr joined the Brown University faculty in 1970 after serving as a researcher at Harvard University, where she received a Ph.D. in physiology in 1965. She was also a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont where she received her B.A. in chemistry.

During her time at Brown, Cserr conducted extensive research on brain anatomy, AIDS research, and the blood brain barrier. Though an award-winning woman in science, Cserr was unjustly denied tenure by Brown University in approximately 1975. Cserr subsequently joined Louise Lamphere, Claude Carey, and Patricia Russian, in suing Brown for sex discrimination. At the time, Cserr was assistant professor of biomedical sciences. In a landmark settlement, Cserr and fellow plaintiffs prevailed and Cserr was awarded retroactive tenure in 1978. She became Professor of Physiology at Brown where she continued to focus her research on the anatomy and mechanism of the human brain.

Cserr was a co-editor of Fluid Environment of the Brain (1975) and author of The Neuronal Microenvironment (1987). In 1992, Brown honored her excellence in teaching and research by naming her the Esther Elizabeth Brintzenhoff Professor of Medical Science.

In an unfortunate irony, Cserr developed a brain tumor in approximately 1992, from which she first fell ill while traveling to Melbourne, Australia for a brain science fellowship. Cserr died of the tumor at age 57 in August 1994. A symposium on lymphatic drainage of the brain was held in England in her honor. Brown established a Helen FitzGerald Cserr fellowship position as well as the Helen FitzGerald Cserr Memorial Fund.