Profile: Eva Griepp

by Jasmine Wong

Current Work

Eva Griepp currently teaches the embryology course in the first year of the Sarah Lawrence Genetic Counseling program. She is also currently teaching the unit on cardiology in the embryology course to medical students at NYU. She also works as a cardiologist at Bellevue Hospital where she teaches medical students in the pediatric cardiology clinic.

Teaching Embryology at SLC

The director of the course at NYU at the time was asked by Joan Marks to teach the course. He was unable to, but had asked Dr. Griepp if she was interested.

SLC and Genetic Counseling

Yes, her older brother is David Botstein, the director of Lewis- Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and one of the first people to suggest RFLP’s to identify unknown regions in DNA. He told her that Sarah Lawrence was the first and best school for genetic counseling. She also had a personal experience with genetic counseling when she had her son, and when she had another pregnancy ending in uterine death. She felt that the genetic counselor's emotional response was very important and helped her with her loss.

The First Class

She started teaching in 1997 when the ABGC examination asked more questions pertaining to embryology.

A Distinguished Family

Her mother and father were both physicians. Her husband is a cardiac surgeon. One son is hoping to go to medical school. Her younger brother Leon Botstein is the president of Bard College and the conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. Of her siblings, she is the least public of the three.

Why cardiology?

She always assumed she wanted to be a doctor. Pediatric cardiology attracted her because she could decipher the condition through physical findings before diagnostic tools. She also finds the growing treatment to be encouraging. At the current time, she and her husband are working on the consequences to the brain if the heart must be arrested during heart or great vessel surgery. She believes this may lead to important information about surgery for congenital heart conditions and aortic aneurysms. They are also studying how to prevent spinal cord injuries arising from aneurysm surgery.

The Sarah Lawrence Genetics Student—Different?

She finds Sarah Lawrence students to be very motivated, with a better understanding of the importance of embryology than medical students.