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Gerty Theresa Cori, née Radnitz, (August 15, 1896 – October 26, 1957) was an American biochemist born in Prague (then Austria-Hungary) who, together with her husband Carl Ferdinand Cori and Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay, received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947 for their discovery of how glycogen (animal starch) — a derivative of glucose — is broken down and resynthesized in the body, for use as a store and source of energy.
Born into a Jewish family, she was tutored at home before enrolling in a Lyceum for girls. In 1914, she started medicine at the German Charles University in Prague, where she met Carl Cori. They married in 1920, with her converting to Catholicism (possibly to lessen the objections of his family). In 1922 they both emigrated to the United States to pursue medical research at the 'State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases' (now the Roswell Park Memorial Institute) in Buffalo, New York.
In 1947 Gerty Cori became the third woman — and first American woman — to win a Nobel Prize in science, the previous recipients being Marie Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie. The same year, she became a full professor of biochemistry at Washington University, a post she held until her death in 1957.
The Cori crater on the Moon is named after her.
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