Susan Lindquist
| Susan Lindquist | |
|---|---|
Susan Lindquist in 2015, portrait via the Royal Society
|
|
| Born | Susan Lee Lindquist June 5, 1949 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | October 27, 2016 (aged 67) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Molecular biology |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Protein and RNA synthesis induced by heat treatment in Drosophila melanogaster tissue culture cells (1976) |
| Doctoral advisor | Matthew Meselson |
| Known for |
protein folding heat-shock proteins prions |
| Notable awards |
|
|
Website lindquistlab |
|
Susan Lee Lindquist, ForMemRS (June 5, 1949 – October 27, 2016) was an American professor of biology at MIT specializing in molecular biology, particularly the protein folding problem within a family of molecules known as heat-shock proteins, and prions. Lindquist was a member and former director of the Whitehead Institute and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010.
Lindquist was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Iver and Eleanor (née Maggio), and attended Maine South High School in Park Ridge.
Lindquist's father and mother were of Swedish and Italian descent, respectively, and although they expected her to become a housewife, Susan studied microbiology at the University of Illinois as an undergraduate and received her PhD in biology from Harvard University in 1976. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the American Cancer Society.
Lindquist is best known for her research that provided strong evidence for a new paradigm in genetics based upon the inheritance of proteins with new, self-perpetuating shapes rather than new DNA sequences. This research provided a biochemical framework for understanding devastating neurological illnesses such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Creutzfeldt–Jakob diseases. She was considered an expert in protein folding, which, as explained by Lindquist in the following excerpt, is an ancient, fundamental problem in biology:
...
Wikipedia