Amity Manning Amity Manning, professor of biology and biotechnology, has been named as the inaugural Dr. Helen G. Vassallo Distinguished Presidential Professor. The professorship, established by a generous gift from Trae and Steve Vassallo ’93 in memory of Steve’s mother, honors the legacy of longtime, pioneering WPI faculty member Helen Vassallo MBA ’82. “Professor Amity Manning, the inaugural recipient of the Dr. Helen G. Vassallo Distinguished Presidential Professorship, exemplifies the values that Helen championed throughout her remarkable career,” says Reeta Rao, professor and Biology and Biotechnology Department head. “I nominated Amity for this honor because she is a brilliant scientist, a dynamic and engaging teacher, a thoughtful mentor, a collaborative leader—all qualities lived by Dr. Helen Vasallo. Amity is also a devoted mother to four wonderful boys. This professorship is especially meaningful to our department as it represents our very first endowed chair. Helen Vassallo paved the way for so many of us, and I’m honored to help carry forward her legacy through Amity’s appointment.” “We established this professorship to honor my mom and cement her legacy as one of WPI’s most generous and impactful professors. She was a true pioneer at nearly every stage of her life, and in every facet,” says Steve Vassallo. “Amity Manning’s record of excellence as a researcher working on the cutting edge and her reputation as a teacher and mentor among students makes her a perfect choice to be the first to hold the professorship that bears my mother’s name.” Manning’s research focuses on defining the cellular mechanisms that maintain genome stability in normal cells and understanding how those pathways are corrupted in cancer cells. Using a combination of molecular and cell biological approaches, together with bioinformatics and imaging techniques, her group aims to identify changes associated with genomic instability in cancer and exploit those changes to identify novel therapeutic targets and enhance cancer cell death. She has received significant grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health to support her research on cancer cell biology, genome stability, chromatin structure, and mitotic regulation. In the classroom and the lab, she is a dedicated teacher and mentor to undergraduate and graduate students, working with them to gain a better understanding of cancer cell biology and to make meaningful contributions to cancer research. In many ways, Manning reflects Dr. Helen Vassallo’s career. Vassallo joined the faculties of WPI’s Management and Biology and Biotechnology departments in 1982 after a distinguished career as an educator, researcher, and business leader in the fields of physiology, pharmacology, and anesthesia. She received a BS from Tufts University and an MS in pharmacology from Tufts University Medical School and then taught at Tufts, Brandeis University, Clark University, and WPI before joining Astra Pharmaceutical Products, where she would become director of scientific and professional information. While at Astra, she completed a PhD in physiology at Clark and an MBA at WPI and was a visiting fellow and special student at MIT’s Sloan Institute, where she studied organizational behavior. Helen Vassallo Dr. Vassallo made a mark during her time at WPI. She served as head of the Management Department from 1989 to 1995, was the longtime chief justice of the Campus Hearing Board, received the Trustees Award for Outstanding Teaching, was recognized as National Sorority Advisor of the Year, belonged to the President’s Council for the Advancement of Women and Minorities, and received the Woman of Consequence Award from the City of Worcester (in 2008). In 2013, she was honored with the Goat’s Head Lifetime Commitment Award from the WPI Alumni Association. She was also the first woman to be elected secretary of the faculty, the highest faculty post. In addition to raising 10 children, three of whom are WPI alumni, Dr. Vassallo also authored numerous articles, two books, one monograph, and is the co-holder of two patents. Along with her impact on the university, she also touched many people who crossed her path. “My mom’s bio clearly needs an intermission—she blazed many trails in her lifetime but never sought the limelight. Instead, her focus was always attuned to service, finding ways to help others achieve their goals and find their own personal, academic, and professional success,” says Steve Vassallo, who majored in mechanical engineering at WPI and then began his career as a design engineer at the global design firm IDEO. Vassallo then went on to lead the development of technologies and products for a broad array of companies including Apple, BMW, Cisco, and many others, and was awarded 77 patents along the way. In 2007, Vassallo joined Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm where he is a general partner and early-stage investor in more than 100 startups, helping them go from idea to IPO and beyond. “As I look back on the last 30 years, it’s clear that the education and life skills I gained at WPI both set the trajectory and elevated the ceiling of my career by providing me with a strong technical foundation combined with an invaluable set of project-based experiences,” he says. “My mom would occasionally remind us kids that it’s not about what you know, it’s about how enthusiastically you approach the things you don’t. This urgent curiosity—the rush to learn, to build, and to solve real problems in the world—is the spirit of WPI as well as the spirit of the start-up world I live in today. And it’s a part of her legacy, too.”