Joan Rivers television critic Jack Gould called Rivers "quite possibly the most intuitively funny woman alive". In 2017, "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked her sixth on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time, and in October the same year, she was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Joan Alexandra Molinsky was born on June 8, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants Beatrice (née Grushman) and Meyer C. Molinsky. She had an elder sister named Barbara Waxler. Rivers spent her early life in Prospect Heights and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where she attended the progressive
Joan E. Strassmann Joan E. Strassmann Joan E. Strassmann is a North American evolutionary biologist and the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology at the Washington University in St. Louis. She is known for her work on social evolution and particularly how cooperation prospers in the face of evolutionary conflicts. Her dissertation research explored theories of social behavior and evolution using individually marked social wasps in wild colonies. In 2011, Strassmann joined the Biology Department of Washington University in St. Louis. after leaving Rice University where she worked for the previous 31 years. Strassman earned a bachelors in zoology from the University of Michigan