Irena Koprowska, née Grasberg (May 12, 1917, Warsaw - August 16, 2012, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania) was a Polish-born pathologist in the United States. In 1985, she won the Papanikolaou Award.[1]
Koprowska was born in 1917 to Eugenia and Henryk Grasberg, the latter of which owned a flour mill in Warsaw, Poland. Growing up, she (like her father) did not identify as Jewish or Catholic, but instead as atheist. [4]
She graduated from Warsaw University Medical School, in 1939. Around this time, Grasberg married Hilary Koprowski, a virologist who discovered the first effective oral polio vaccine. But she and Hilary, a Jewish man, were forced to flee Poland as the Nazi army began its invasion of Warsaw. [5]
Koprowska was mentored by Dr. Georgios Papanikolaou the inventor of the "Pap smear", and went on to become a leader in the field of cytopathology.[6][2] Dr. Koprowska was a founding member of the Inter Society Council of Cytology, which became the American Society of Cytopathology.[2] Additionally, she co-authored, with Dr. George Papanicolaou, a case report of the earliest diagnosis of lung cancer by a sputum smear.[2]
