MIT World Speakers

Susan Lindquist

Susan L. Lindquist is a pioneer in the study of protein folding. She works not only with bakers’ yeast, but also with fruit flies, the plant Arabidopsis and mammals. Her labs use genetics, molecular and cell biology 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 Ph.D. 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.