News
In Memoriam: Mei-Fang Cheng, PhD
August 3, 2022
I regret to announce that Mei-Fang Cheng passed away last Sunday on July 24th. Mei Cheng was a behavioral neuroendocrinologist who was born in Taiwan during World War II but pursued graduate and post-doctoral studies in the United States.
She then joined the laboratory of Daniel Lehrman at the Institute of Animal Behavior, Rutgers University-Newark where she spent her entire career first as a research associate and then in 1969 as an assistant professor becoming a full professor in 1979. She also served as Acting Director and then Director of the Institute of Animal Behavior from 1989 to 1994.
Her initial work at Rutgers involving classic experiments of gonadectomy and hormone replacement established links between ovarian steroids and female reproductive behaviors. Then via a combination of experimental approaches she established the notion of self-stimulation by which the behavior expressed by a female dove retroactively affects her own behavior and physiology. She also demonstrated the presence of an active neurogenesis in the hypothalamus of doves in response to local lesions and the contribution of the new neurons to the behavioral recovery after lesions.
Jacques Balthazart
University of Liege