Un-Jin Paik Zimmerman, professor emeritus of physiology at the University of Pennyslvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, died October 2 at her home in Bryn Mawr after several months of hospice care. She was 85.

Dr. Zimmerman was born in Seoul, Korea. She attended the Kyung-Gi Girls’ School, where she excelled at academics, ping-pong and tennis. After high school, she was one of the first two women ever admitted to Seoul National, the nation’s top medical school. Her father owned a dictionary that she used to learn English. During a wartime exodus of civilians to Pusan, she found employment as an extremely rare language translator at a US Army–run hospital for war orphans. She was one of the first Koreans to attend Bryn Mawr College, earning her BA there in 1956 and her PhD in chemistry also at Bryn Mawr in 1961. She also earned her MS from Yale in 1958, where she was one of two women graduate students in all of the sciences. Prior to teaching at Penn, she taught at Bryn Mawr Collge from 1962-1964.

She then began a 25-year career in biochemistry research at Penn. In 1975, she began as a part-time postdoc trainee in microbiology. She went on to become a research specialist in pathology and then a research associate in pathology and laboratory medicine. In 1989, she became a research associate in the Institute for Environmental Medicine.

During her time at Penn, she was the project leader for the project “Lung Surfactant Secretion” due to her experience in isolation and culture of lung epithelial cells, her experience and knowledge of measurements related to phospholid secretion, and her experience with proteolytic mechanisms and their potential relevance to the secretory event. Dr. Zimmerman was instrumental in the formulation and presentation of the original project and was the co-investigator.

From 1993 until her retirement in 1998, she served as a research assistant professor of physiology; she then became emeritus.

She was a member of the American Society of Biological Chemists, New York Academy of Sciences and  Sigma Xi.

In 2012, she published her memoir, Autobiographical Sketches of Un-Jin Paik Zimmerman.

She is survived by her children, Landis, Emily, David and Louise Hoehl; four grandchildren, Grace and Charlotte Zimmerman, and Karl and Katherine Hoehl; three siblings, Paik Kyung-Jin, Paik Hyung-Jin, and Paeck Sogene; as well as nieces and nephews Sam Won, Suzanne, Thomas, George, Alice, Katherine, Chang-ho, Kyung-hee and Kyung-hwa.