Evelyn Maisel is an American geneticist who was awarded the National Medal of Science for her work on DNA mutagenesis and DNA repair. He was born on born March 9, 1921 in New York City, New York, U.S. Maisel was raised in Manhattan and later Queens in New York City. At age 16 she began undergraduate studies at New York University (NYU) and in 1941 completed a bachelor’s degree there. She planned to remain at NYU for graduate studies, but a suspension received during her senior year for protesting against NYU’s acquiescence to segregation in Southern schools during athletic events caused her to enroll instead at nearby Columbia University, where she earned a master’s in 1943. Witkin received many awards and honours during her career, including the National Medal of Science (2002) and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2015). She was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1977 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. In 1979 she was named the Barbara McClintock Professor of Genetics at Rutgers, where she retired in 1991 as professor emerita.