Elizabeth H. Blackburn

Elizabeth Blackburn is a leader in the area of telomere and telomerase research, and has made key discoveries about telomere function and biology. In 1985, she discovered the ribonucleoprotein enzyme, telomerase, and since that time, hers has become a lead laboratory in manipulating and studying telomerase activity in cells. Blackburn and her research team at UCSF are working with a variety of organisms and human cells, especially cancer cells, with the goal of understanding telomerase and telomere biology.

Blackburn earned her B.Sc. (1970) and M.Sc. (1972) degrees from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and her Ph.D. (1975) from the University of Cambridge in England. She did postdoctoral work in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Yale from 1975 to 1977, and in 1978, joined the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1990, she joined the Departments of Microbiology and Immunology, and Biochemistry and Biophysics, at the University of California San Francisco, and served as Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 1993 to 1999. She is currently the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Throughout her career, Blackburn has been honored by her peers with many prestigious awards, including the Bristol Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Cancer Research (2003) and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science (2005). She was named California Scientist of the Year (1999) and elected President of the American Society for Cell Biology (1998). Blackburn is an elected Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences and an elected Member of the Institute of Medicine.