Elizabeth Blackburn

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Elizabeth Blackburn is Professor Emeritaat the University of California San Francisco. She was President of the Salk Institute from 2016 to 2018. Dr. Blackburn is a pioneering molecular biologist. Since 2001 she had served as a Salk Non-Resident Fellow while she was a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Blackburn won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for discovering the molecular nature of telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that serve as protective caps essential for preserving genetic information, and for co-discovering telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomere ends. Both telomeres and telomerase are thought to play central roles in aging and diseases such as cancer, and her work helped launch entire new fields of research in these areas. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Blackburn has received nearly every major award in science including the Lasker, Gruber, and Gairdner prizes. She was named to the TIME 100 in 2007, the magazine’s yearly list of the most influential people in the world. She is a member of numerous prestigious scientific societies including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the Royal Society of London. She has served as president of both the American Association of Cancer Research and the American Society for Cell Biology, and has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals including the influential journals Cell and Science. Helping to guide public science policy, she was a member of the Stem Cell Research Advisory Panel for the California State Legislature and a member of the President’s Council of Bioethics, an advisory committee to the President of the United States. She currently serves on the Board of then Biden Cancer Initiative.