Mary Ellen Beck Wohl was chief of the respiratory diseases division at Children's Hospital Boston (a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School), and served as associate director of the general clinical research center until a few years before her death in November 2009. Since the 1960s, when she first joined the university, Wohl specialized in the respiratory diseases of children and was a leader in the field of clinical research on Cystic fibrosis. She developed a number of techniques to evaluate the function of the lungs in young children and is the author of many research papers in this field.