Carol W. Greider, Ph.D., 2009 Nobel Laureate in Medicine to speak at UC Santa Cruz: “Telomeres: why equilibrium matters, and how to achieve it”
10 am Friday March 2
UC Santa Cruz, Engineering Building E2-180 (Simularium)
Dr. Greider received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. Her supervisor at Berkeley was Elizabeth Blackburn, whom she later shared a Nobel Prize with. Greider’s prize was in genetics was “for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.”
See a video interview with Dr. Greider
This event jointly hosted by UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute and UCSC STEM Postdocs Association (USPA)
Biography:
Carol W. Greider, Ph.D.
Daniel Nathans Professor and Director, Molecular Biology and Genetics
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biology
Carol Greider, Ph.D. received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, working together with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, she discovered telomerase, an enzyme that maintains telomeres, or chromosome ends. In 1988, Dr. Greider went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where, as an independent Cold Spring Harbor Fellow, she cloned and characterized the RNA component of telomerase. In 1990, Dr. Greider was appointed as an assistant investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, followed later by appointment to Investigator in 1994. She expanded the focus of her telomere research to include the role of telomere length in cellular senescence, cell death and in cancer. In 1997, Dr. Greider moved her laboratory to the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In 2003, she was appointed as the Daniel Nathans Professor and Director of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. At Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Greider’s group continued to study the biochemistry of telomerase and determined the secondary structure of the human telomerase RNA. In addition, she characterized the loss of telomere function in mice, which allowed an understanding of human’s short telomere diseases, such as bone marrow and other stem cell failure diseases. Dr. Greider shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 with Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres and telomerase. Dr. Greider currently directs a group of eight scientists studying both the role of short telomeres in age-related disease and cancer as well as the regulatory mechanism that maintain telomere length.