Anna Marie (Ann) Skalka (née Sturn)[1] is an American virologist, molecular biologist and geneticist[2] who is professor emeritus and senior advisor to the president at the Fox Chase Cancer Center.
In 1960, she transferred to the microbiology department of New York University (NYU) Medical School, supervised initially by the bacterial geneticist Werner Maas and then by the biochemist Jerard Hurwitz, who was researching nucleic acids.
[1] In 1968, after Hershey retired and the unit closed, Skalka joined the newly founded Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, at Nutley, New Jersey, where she remained until 1987.
In the early 1980s, Skalka's laboratory cloned unintegrated ASV and studied transcriptional regulatory elements in the viral long terminal repeats (LTRs).
With collaborator Susan Astrin at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, the laboratory cloned part of the avian endogenous provirus ev-1 as well as its integration site; the results suggested similarities between retroviruses and transposable elements.