Carol W. Greider

Carol Greider is a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University, who discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984 while working with Elizabeth Blackburn. She pioneered research on the structure of telomeres, the ends of chromosomes.

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Biography

Greider is the Daniel Nathans Professor and director of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences.

Greider grew up in Davis, California. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a B.A. in biology in 1983. She completed her Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1987 at the University of California, Berkeley, with Elizabeth Blackburn. At Berkeley, Greider discovered telomerase, which is a key player in cancer.

Greider then completed her postdoctoral work and accepted a faculty position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, NY. She accepted a faculty position at Johns Hopkins in 1997, and has previously taught at Duke University, in the Program in Genetics and Genomics. [1].

Awards and Honors

• Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2007) (shared with Elizabeth Blackburn and Joseph G. Gall)
• Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (2006) (shared with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak)
• Dickson Prize (2006)
• Member, National Academy of Sciences (2003)
• Richard Lounsbery Award (2003), National Academy of Sciences [2] ("For her pioneering biochemical and genetic studies of telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the ends of chromosomes in eukaryotic cells.")
• Member, American Society for Cell Biology (1999)
• Gairdner Foundation International Award (1998)

Critical Papers

• Greider, C.W. & Blackburn, E.H. (1985) "Identification of a specific telomere terminal transferase activity in Tetrahymena extracts." Cell v.43, (2 Pt. 1) pp. 405-413.

Notes and References

See also

• Regina Nuzzo, "Biography of Carol W. Greider," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), June 7, 2005, v. 102, no. 23, pp. 8077-8079, available at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/extract/102/23/8077 .