Betsy Middleton Sutherland earned the PhD in radiation biology in 1967. After completing postdoctoral work at the Walter Reed Research Institute and the University of California Berkeley, she taught at the University of California Irvine before moving permanently to the Brookhaven National Laboratory as senior biochemist. She studies DNA damage and repair in people and in higher plants and has produced more than 125 publications. She received the International Photobiology Congress’s Edna M. Rowe Memorial Award and was the first female recipient of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Award for outstanding contributions in atomic energy. She is a member of the UT Alumni Academic Hall of Fame.