Obituaries

Recent Obituaries
In Memoriam Archive

Expanding Scientific Perspectives

Zara Yael Weinberg ’11

October 28, 2025, in San Francisco, from lung cancer.

Zara grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, occupying herself breaking and learning to fix old computers and hanging out in Borders Bookstore. She entered Reed intending to major in linguistics, and studied Russian on campus and Arabic during the summer. By the end of her third semester, however, she realized what truly interested her was how the brain constructed language.

Reed had no neuroscience major then, so Zara worked with her adviser, Professor Paul Currie [psychology 2007–23], to major in psychology and take biology and chemistry courses. While working on her thesis research, which revealed an interaction between feeding signals and drugs of abuse, she became fascinated by the way multiple signals act on the same physiology to produce distinct outcomes.

After Reed, Zara moved to San Francisco to start a job in Google’s internal tech support training program, drawing on skills she developed fixing computers in high school. Two years later, research pulled her back, and she started her PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 with Dr. Manoj Puthenveedu. Her work focused on novel mechanisms by which hormones and drugs of abuse produce different responses through the same cellular receptors. She received her PhD in biology in 2017.

During her time at CMU, Zara came out publicly as a trans woman. “Being trans is an important part of my scientific perspective. It helps me question dogma and see beyond false binaries that are ingrained in science,” she said in an interview with Nature in 2022 for Transgender Day of Visibility. “I spent a lot of time worrying that being trans would somehow subsume the rest of my identity—that I would only ever be known as that trans scientist—so for several years after I first came out, I tried to hide it. But being proudly trans has instead enriched my other identities. It has now become another part of the rich tapestry of my life and identity that helps to make me be the best scientist I can be.”

As a postdoc with Dr. Hana el Samad at UC San Francisco, Zara built synthetic tools to control cellular behavior and used those tools to better understand how different cell types repurpose the same proteins to generate unique functions. Her dream was to lead her own research group and drive science forward while mentoring other scientists-in-training.

Toward that end, Zara applied for and was awarded a K99 career transition award from the now-defunct NIH MOSAIC program in 2023. Mentorship and teaching were the most important and satisfying parts of her career, and she devoted considerable effort to supporting other scientists with marginalized identities.

Zara met her wife, Kayleigh Stevenson ’10, at Reed, along with many other lifelong friends. Her work was important to her, but friendships even more so. She maintained a staggering number of relationships from early childhood (via AOL Instant Messenger) and beyond (switching to iMessage and Signal) through the final year of her life. “Yapping” was her favorite activity, but she also loved music and going to shows in a wide variety of genres. Her community service project was maintaining a media server for her friends from across the country.

Zara was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2022. Thanks to advances in treatment and the excellent care she received at UCSF, as well as supportive mentors and her K99 funding, she was able to continue doing the work that was important to her until the end of her life. She is remembered by friends and colleagues alike for leading with compassion and authenticity in every part of her life.

Professionally, Zara was a fierce critic of for-profit publishing and a staunch advocate for junior scientists through her mentorship and work with her union. In her friendships, she was endlessly generous and empathetic. She loved bringing people together and set a laudable example for maintaining relationships across distance and time. Countless friendships and professional relationships that she nurtured outlive her.

Zara is survived by her wife, Kayleigh, and her parents, Richard and Julie Weinberg.

Appeared in Reed magazine: Fall 2026

comments powered by Disqus