Elizabeth Blackburn

Elizabeth Blackburn
With AIC Gold Medal, 2012
Born	Elizabeth Helen Blackburn (1948-11-26) 26 November 1948 (age 68) Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Residence	US
Citizenship	Australian and American
Fields	Molecular biology
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley University of California, San Francisco Yale University Salk Institute
Alma mater	University of Melbourne (BSc) University of Cambridge (PhD)
Thesis	Sequence studies on bacteriophage ØX174 DNA by transcription (1974)
Doctoral advisor	Frederick Sanger
Doctoral students	include Carol W. Greider
Notable awards	NAS Award in Molecular Biology (1990) FRS (1992) Australia Prize (1998) Harvey Prize {1999} Dickson Prize (2000) Heineken Prize (2004) Lasker Award Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize ASCB Public Service Award (2004) Meyenburg Prize (2006) L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science (2008) Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2009) AIC Gold Medal (2012)
Website biochemistry2.ucsf.edu/labs/blackburn

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, AC, FRS,FAA, FRSN (born 26 November 1948) is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is currently the President of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Previously she was a biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studied the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, becoming the only Tasmanian-born Nobel laureate. She also worked in medical ethics, and was controversially dismissed from the Bush Administration's President's Council on Bioethics.

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn was born in Hobart, Tasmania on 26 November 1948. Her family moved to the town when she was four, where she attended the Broadland House Church of England Girls' Grammar School (later amalgamated with Launceston Church Grammar School) until the age of sixteen. Upon her family's relocation to Melbourne, she then attended University High School, and ultimately gained very high marks in the end-of-year final statewide matriculation exams. She went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in 1970 and Master of Science in 1972, both from the University of Melbourne and her PhD in 1974 from the University of Cambridge on the bacteriophage Phi X 174 while a student of Darwin College, Cambridge. She then carried out postdoctoral work in molecular and cellular biology between 1975 and 1977 at Yale University.