Susan Lindquist: 5th June

 "Today in Science History" says, 

"Susan Lee Lindquist (born 1949) was an American molecular biologist who pioneered with her studies of protein folding.

 

"She showed that alternate structural shapes of protein molecules could result in substantially different effects. She demonstrated instances in fields as diverse as human diseases, evolution and synthetic biomaterials designed to interact with biological systems. Prion protein are known as disease agents, but her work with yeast prion proteins also demonstrated a mechanism of protein-only inheritance. She extended this to interpret involvement in cellular memory and cross-kingdom communication. On 17 Nov 2010, Lindquist was awarded a National Medal of Science for her work, presented by President Obama at the White House."

Susan studied microbiology at the University of Illinois as an undergraduate and received her PhD in biology from Harvard University in 1976. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the American Cancer Society. She was a professor at the University of Chicargo and carried out research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and MIT and was appointed as Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, one of the first women in the nation to lead a major independent research organization

Lindquist lectured nationally and internationally on a variety of scientific topics. In June 2006, she was the inaugural guest on the "Futures in Biotech" podcast on Leo Laporte's TWiT network In 2007, she participated in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with other MIT leaders.

She died 27 Oct 2016 at age 67 and is remembered in the Susan Lindquist Chair for Women in Science at the Whitehead Institute.