By Amy Widner
April 30, 2019 | Gwen Childs, Ph.D., of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), is the 2019 recipient of the highest award offered by the national Histochemical Society.
Childs is a professor and chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Developmental Sciences in the UAMS College of Medicine. She received the George Gomori, M.D., Ph.D., Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of histochemistry and cytochemistry. It is presented every four years.
She received the award on April 7 at the Histochemical Society Symposium at the interdisciplinary Experimental Biology 2019 meeting in Orlando, Florida. The following morning, she delivered a talk on the history of immunocytochemistry through modern discoveries titled, “Immunocytochemistry: Challenging Paradigms to Illuminate New Discoveries in the Pituitary.”
In histochemistry, scientists use stains, indicators and microscopes to identify and study chemicals in biological tissue.
Childs began her research in the immunohistochemistry field as a graduate student in the early 1970s and continued this focus through the 1990s. Her laboratory originally developed novel histochemical and immunohistochemical approaches to identify and unravel the mystery of multipotential pituitary cells, challenging paradigms of the day. Current studies focus on how the metabolome communicates with pituitary cells.