Mariann Blum, age 52, of San Antonio, died on Sunday, January 26, 2003.

Mariann Blum was born in Houston, Texas to Lillian and Manuel Blum and raised in Bellaire and Meyerland. She graduated from Bellaire High School.

She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977 and then received her Doctorate of Philosophy in Biochemistry from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in 1982.

In 1982 she went to the Rockefeller University in New York to do postdoctoral work with the renowned neuroscientist, Dr Bruce McEwen, and her work was supported by a fellowship from the Kempner Foundation and an NIH National Research Service Award. Mariann was appointed to the adjunct faculty at Rockefeller University and did additional training in Molecular Neurobiology in the lab of James Roberts at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

In 1986 she joined the faculty of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York in the Dr Arthur M. Fishberg Research Center for Neurobiology as an Assistant Professor. In 1993 she was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor and received a secondary appointment in the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development.

With her move to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 2001 she was promoted to the rank of Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and the Center for Biomedical Neurosciences and received an appointment in the Audie Murphy Veteran's Administration Medical Center.

Mariann's scientific research program was continuously funded throughout her career by research grants from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke and the National Institute of Aging.

Her scientific interests centered around the understanding of how the neurons which are damaged in Parkinson's Disease die and how they could be stimulated to survive or regenerate.

One of her earlier contributions which changed the way neuroscientists thought about the brain was her careful analysis of the levels of growth factor gene expression throughout development in the brain, finding the levels were actually highest in the adult animal leading to the observation the growth factors continued to be very important in the brain, even after it was fully formed.

During her career, Mariann published over sixty peer reviewed papers and reviews, supervised five Ph.D. students for their dissertation and trained over a dozen postdoctoral fellows and visiting faculty in her lab.

She is survived by her husband of 17 years , James Roberts; her mother, Lillian Blum; sister, Cathy Blum and her husband, Jon Rusciano; brothers, Andrew Blum and Mitchel Blum; and her nephew, Aaron Blum.

The family has requested that in lieu of flowers that donations be made in her name to the Medina Community Library, PO Box 300, Medina, TX 78055 where they will be used to fund the development of the meditation and reading garden in the new library.

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