In memoriam: Professor Krystyna E. Wiśniewski. 8.7.1930-30.5.2008

Professor Krystyna E. Wiśniewski graduated from the Medical School in Gdansk in 1955. In 1958, after completing specialization in Pediatrics, she was employed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics of the Medical School in Gdansk. In 1960, she received a doctoral fellowship from the Department of Neuropathology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw directed by Professor Ewa Ossetowska and moved to Warsaw. In 1965, she defended her Ph.D. thesis on the morphology of perivascular glial membrane in cases with arteriosclerosis with and without hypertension and received her specialty in Neuropathology. At that time, she also worked as an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Warsaw Medical School and then as a Senior Researcher in the Department of Neuropathology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In 1965, she was a visiting scientist in the Department of Neuropathology of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt.

The American part of her life began in 1967, when she came with two sons to New York to join her husband, Professor Henryk Wiśniewski, already an internationally recognized research scientist and a pioneer of modern studies on Alzheimer’s disease. She started her career as a Fellow and then Acting Neuropathologist in the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York and St. Barnabas Hospital for Chronic Diseases, Bronx, New York. In 1971, she completed Residency Programs in Pediatrics in the Jewish Memorial and Montefiore Hospital, Bronx, New York. In 1974, she finished a Residency in Pediatric Neurology and in 1976 in Neuropathology in the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York.

In 1974 she moved with her husband to England, where she worked as an Attending Pediatric Neurologist and Neuropathologist in Newcastle General Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1976, upon returning to New York, she continued her professional career as an Associate Director of Clinical Services at the George Jervis Diagnostic and Research Clinic, Head of Pediatric Neuropathology Laboratory and Director of Ultrastructural Laboratory at the New York State Institute for Basic Research (IBR) in Developmental Disabilities, Staten Island, New York, directed by Professor Henryk Wiśniewski, and as a Professor of Child Neurology and Attending Child Neurologist at the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn. She also served as a New York Pediatric...


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