Sara Will Crews Finley, a geneticist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has died, according to the school. She was 82. Finley and her husband, Wayne, founded the medical genetics program at UAB, the first in the southeast US. She joined the medical faculty in 1960 — the school was then called Medical College of Alabama — and co-directed UAB's medical genetics lab for 30 years.
"Sara Finley was a true pioneer in medicine," Bruce Korf, the chair of the UAB genetics department, says in a statement. "She and her husband, Wayne, were among the first physicians to recognize the importance of the new field of medical genetics, and they were among the first to implement new technologies for culturing cells and analyzing chromosomes. These technologies helped untold numbers of families by providing new approaches to the diagnosis and classification of birth defects and genetic disorders, as well as enabling genetic counseling for families."