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Dr. Lindquist was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 for pioneering the molecular understanding of how cells respond to extreme stress by producing proteins designed to prevent and repair damage. She elegantly elucidated how heat shock proteins are regulated post-transcriptionally and how they produce stress tolerance by modulating the activity and aggregation state of other proteins.
Changes in protein conformation govern most processes in cell biology, and protein-conformational defects are responsible for an extraordinary variety of pathologies, ranging from Alzheimer's disease and cancer in humans to heat and drought susceptibility in plants. Dr. Lindquist's laboratory studies cellular mechanisms that govern several types of protein-conformational switches. Because protein folding problems are universal, she works primarily with yeast, fruit flies, and the mustard weed, model organisms that provide powerful tools for molecular genetic analysis. Currently, her lab focuses on chaperone proteins and prion proteins.
Dr. Lindquist received her undergraduate degree in microbiology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and her Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University. She joined the University of Chicago faculty, where she subsequently became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Lindquist was appointed to the Stowers Institute Scientific Advisory Board in 2000. She served as Director of the Whitehead Institute and is currently a member of the Whitehead Institute and Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. | 