Steitz wins Lasker lifetime achievement award
The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced today the recipients of the 2018 Lasker Awards. Among the four recipients was Joan Steitz, a professor of biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators and a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Joan SteitzAlbert and Mary Lasker Foundation
Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science “for four decades of leadership in biomedical science — exemplified by pioneering discoveries in RNA biology, generous mentorship of budding scientists, and vigorous and passionate support of women in science,” according to a news release from the foundation.
Over her pioneering career in RNA biology, for which she won the ASBMB’s Herbert Tabor Research Award in 2015, Steitz has been known as a generous mentor to young scientists and an ardent voice for inclusion in the scientific community. (Watch her Tabor award lecture here.)
Steitz, a former member of the ASBMB Council and a past winner of the society’s Lipmann lectureship, will accept her Lasker award Sept. 24.
The other 2018 Lasker winners were:
- David Allis and Michael Grunstein, who won the Basic Medical Research Award for their studies of histone modifications and gene expression. (Allis was an ASBMB annual meeting plenary lecturer in 2015. Watch his lecture here. Also, see this ASBMB Today story about diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG, a deadly pediatric brain cancer. Allis is quoted.)
- John B. Glen, who won the Clinical Research Award for the discovery and development of the anesthetic propofol.
Enjoy reading ASBMB Today?
Become a member to receive the print edition monthly and the digital edition weekly.
Learn moreGet the latest from ASBMB Today
Enter your email address, and we’ll send you a weekly email with recent articles, interviews and more.
Latest in People
People highlights or most popular articles
Shedding light on Usher syndrome
On this awareness day, learn about the most common cause of genetic deaf–blindness and those it affects.
Top-notch papers by postdocs
During National Postdoc Appreciation Week, learn about the postdoc first authors of the most-read papers in ASBMB’s journals.
Completing the cycle of genomic medicine
Wolfgang Pernice is both a patient with and a researcher of Charcot‒Marie‒Tooth disease.
Honors for Nogales, Marqusee, Cohen and Hobbs
Awards, promotions, milestones and more. Find out what's going on in the lives of ASBMB members.
In memoriam: Henry Bourne
He was a professor at UC San Francisco for four decades focusing his research on the role of G proteins in cell signaling and disease, and an ASBMB member for almost 30 years.
Combining project management and people management in industry
Our industry careers columnist talked to Isha Dey, a cell biologist at Thermo Fisher Scientific, about her role as a scientist in industry.