I am sad to report the death of Dr. Katherine Parker Ponder, a valued WashU faculty member for 24 years, first in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and then in the Department of Medicine in the Division of Hematology.
Dr. Ponder succumbed to her breast cancer after a long battle that she approached with grace and tenacity. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Cum Laude from Stanford University. She completed medical school at Washington University in St. Louis. Her medical career was distinguished by the Antoinette Frances Dame Prize in Physiology and Biophysics, the George F. Gill Prize in Anatomy, the Kehar S. Chouke Prize in Anatomy, the Margaret G. Smith Award, the Medical Center Alumni Scholarship Fund Prize, the Merck Manual Award, the Upjohn Achievement Award for Research and the American Medical Women’s Association Scholarship Achievement Award. She was also a member of Alpha Omega Alpha. She completed residency at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, TX.
Following her medical training, she worked with Joan Steitz at Yale and then Savio Woo at Baylor before returning to join the faculty at Washington University in 1990. Dr. Ponder had a long and distinguished career as a tenured professor in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Ponder began her career in gene therapy in the lab of Dr. Woo. There, she began using retroviruses to transduce hepatocytes in dogs for the treatment of alpha-1 anti-trypsin deficiency.
Dr. Ponder quickly developed an independent gene therapy program at Washington University. Her work initially focused on using retroviruses in rats to express Factor X and Protein C. She then began a long collaboration with Dr. Mark Sands that used gene therapy to treat mucopolysaccharidosis in mice and then dogs. She expanded her work to hemophilia A and B with therapeutic expression of Factor VIII and IX in dogs. She also helped characterize immune reactions that led to decreased expression of transferred genes. She wrote key commentaries on the use of gene therapy in both hemophilia and mucopolysaccharidosis. In tribute to her long career in gene therapy, Dr. Ponder was awarded the Sonia Skarlatos Public Service Award from the American Society of Cell and Gene Therapy in 2016. She was recognized as a key contributor and expert in the field of gene therapy especially for mucopolysaccharidosis and hemophilia.
She is survived by her husband, Jay William Ponder; her siblings, Charlie Parker, Christy Parker and Sandy Parker Bigg; and her children, daughter Kaitlin, son Tyler and his wife, Anna Huang. She is predeceased by her brother, Keith Parker; mother, Mary Langston Parker; and father, Charles Ward Parker.