page_title: Margaret Oakley Dayhoff
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Oakley Dayhoff / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Washington Square Park
context_page_description: Margaret Belle Dayhoff was an American physical chemist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff was a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center and a noted research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation where she pioneered the application of mathematics and computational methods to the field of biochemistry. She dedicated her career to applying the evolving computational technologies to support advances in biology and medicine, most notably the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases and tools to interrogate the databases. She originated one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations. The one-letter code used for amino acids was developed by her, reflecting an attempt to reduce the size of the data files used to describe amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing.
  Her PhD degree was from Columbia University in the Department of Chemistry, where she devised computational methods to calculate molecular resonance energies of several organic compounds.
context_section_description: Dayhoff was born an only child in Philadelphia, but moved to New York City when she was ten. Her academic promise was evident from the outset – she was valedictorian (class of 1942) at Bayside High School, Bayside, New York and from there received a scholarship to Washington Square College of New York University, graduating magna cum laude in mathematics in 1945 and getting elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
caption: Washington Square Park, near where Dayhoff's undergraduate work was conducted
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