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Scholar/athlete recalls post-match fun

Athletics and academics are complementary endeavors for Joanne Marie Wroblewski, B.A. '77 & Ph.D. '92. A member of the UB women's volleyball team from 1972-76, she was team cocaptain and "Athlete of the Week" during her junior and senior years, while completing requirements for a biology degree.

Now a postdoctoral scholar at the Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Wroblewski stays fit as a member of the United States Tennis Association, competing in USTA league tennis with a 4.5 rating.

"At UB, I played two years of tennis, one year of basketball and four years of volleyball," she says. "Probably the high point would have been in tennis when my partner, Sue Patterson, and I won the consolation doubles at the New York State Tournament."

Today Wroblewski keeps up with collegiate athletics, attending University of Kentucky gymnastics, volleyball and basketball events when her schedule permits. Intercollegiate matches are now more competitively charged, she contends. "In my freshman and sophomore years, when you went to another school, or they came here, you would 'munch out' with your opponents after the game, win or lose. You probably wouldn't do that today, certainly at the collegiate level. Even by the time of my junior and senior years, the environment was changing from a social to a more competitive one."

After doing graduate research at the blood bank at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Wroblewski transferred to the pathology department in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, where she earned her Ph.D. From 1991-93, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of medicine, division of hematology/oncology at the University of California-San Francisco, working under Dr. Timothy Meeker, whom she followed to the University of Kentucky. She and Meeker are coauthors of a recent article in Cancer Gene Therapy, entitled "Selective Elimination (Purging) of Contaminating Malignant Cells from Hematopoietic Stem Cell Autografts Using Recombinant Adenovirus."