Molecular Biology

at Berkeley, where she worked with Elizabeth Blackburn, and co-discovered telomerase. In 1988, she went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was promoted to Senior Staff Scientist. In 1997 she moved to The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she is currently the Daniel Nathans Professor and Director of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. Her work focuses on the mechanisms of telomere length regulation and short telomere syndromes, as well as telomeres in cancer. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is the recipient of numerous awards. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak for the discovery of telomerase.

Gisela Storz graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1984 with a B.A. in Biochemistry and received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1988 from the University of California at Berkeley, where she worked for Bruce Ames. After postdoctoral fellowships with Sankar Adhya at the National Cancer Institute and Fred Ausubel at Harvard Medical School, she moved to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, where she is now an NIH Distinguished Investigator. Her research is focused on understanding gene regulation in response to environmental stress as well as elucidating the functions of regulatory RNAs and very small proteins. She is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and National Academy of Sciences, and received the American Society for Microbiology Eli Lilly Award.

Cynthia Wolberger received her A.B. in Physics from Cornell University in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University in 1987, where she worked with Stephen Harrison and Mark Ptashne on the structure of the phage 434 cro repressor bound to DNA. She went on to study the structures of eukaryotic protein-DNA complexes as a postdoctoral fellow, first in the laboratory of Robert Stroud and the University of California, San Francisco and then in the laboratory of Carl Pabo at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she is now Professor of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on the structural and biochemical mechanisms underlying transcriptional regulation and ubiquitin-mediated signalling. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.