Maud Menten

Maud Leonora Menten (1879 to 1960) was a Canadian physician and chemist who made significant contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry and invented a procedure that remains in use. Born in Port Lambton, Ontario, she studied medicine at the University of Toronto and was among the first women in Canada to earn a medical doctorate. Because women were not allowed to take part in research in Canada at the time, she moved to Berlin in 1912, where she worked with Leonor Michaelis. Their 1913 paper showed that the rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction is proportional to the amount of the enzyme-substrate complex, a relationship known as the Michaelis-Menten equation. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1916 and joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1923, where she was head of pathology at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh until her retirement in 1950.