Susan Lindquist, Ph.D.
Member, Whitehead Institute

Professor of Biology, MIT

http://www.wi.mit.edu/research/faculty/lindquist.html

Whitehead Member and MIT Professor of Biology Susan L. Lindquist is a pioneer in the study of the stress response and protein folding. She concentrates on chaperones (proteins that help others to assume their proper shape) and prions (proteins with the property of causing others to assume an alternative shape). Focusing on bakers’ yeast as a model organism, but also using fruit flies, the plant Arabidopsis and Mammalian systems, she employs a combination of genetics, molecular and cell biology analyses, and biophysical methods, to understand the mechanisms of prion propagation, generation of diversity and human disease.

Lindquist came to the Whitehead in 2001 from the University of Chicago where she was the Albert D. Lasker Professor of Medical Sciences in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received her PhD in Biology from Harvard University in 1976, going to the University of Chicago as an American Cancer Society Post-doctoral Fellow before joining the faculty there in 1977. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1997, the same year she became a Fellow in American Academy of Microbiology. In 2000, she was awarded the Novartis Drew Award in Biomedical Research. Lindquist served as director of Whitehead Institute from 2001 to 2004.
Click here if you are interested in meeting with Dr. Lindquist.