Victoria Lundblad
Victoria Lundblad | |
---|---|
Citizenship | American |
Alma mater | UC Berkeley Harvard University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Genetics |
Institutions | Salk Institute for Biological Studies |
Victoria Lundblad is an American geneticist whose work focuses on the genetic control of chromosome behavior in yeast.[1] Many of her discoveries have concerned telomerase, the RNA-containing enzyme that completes the ends of chromosomes.[1] She works at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.[2]
Early life and education
Victoria Lundblad was born in the Bay Area of California to a biochemist and a school teacher.[2] Vicki Lundblad was involved in science experiments as early as junior high school, testing whether skin emitted substances that repelled mosquitoes.[3] She then took up playing the cello and threw herself into music studies; arriving at University of California, Berkeley,[2] she meant to major in mathematics and music.[3] She narrowed it down to Mathematics, but later added Biology.[2]
She pursued graduate education in biology at Harvard University, where she became Nancy Kleckner's first graduate student.[2] At Harvard, she was excited by a lecture by Jack Szostak, Nobel laureate in 2016, about his work on telomeres with Elizabeth Blackburn.[3] She began a postdoctoral fellowship in 1983, working with Jack Szostak on yeast with a defective telomerase that underwent early senescence.[3] She continued her study of telomeres as a postdoctoral fellow in Elizabeth Blackburn's laboratory. In 1991, she joined the genetics department at Baylor College of Medicine.[2] In 2004, she moved to the Salk Institute.[2]
Research career
In 1989, Lundblad identified a gene named
In 2017, three women full professors at the Salk Institute filed gender discrimination suits against the institute, pointing out that research funding was not distributed fairly, that only 13% of the research staff were women, and that of the five smallest laboratory spaces, four were assigned to women, among other problems.
In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology — one of 16 women out of the 88 new fellows that year.[6]
Honors and awards
- 1997 DeBakey Excellence in Research Award from Baylor College of Medicine[1]
- 2008 Pearl Mester Greengard Prize from Rockefeller University.[3]
- 2015 National Academy of Sciences in Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology
Selected works
Nugent CI, Hughes TR, Lue NF, Lundblad V.(1996) "Cdc13p: a single-strand telomeric DNA-binding protein with a dual role in yeast telomere maintenance." Science 274(5285):249-52.
Lundblad V, Wright WE. (1996) "Telomeres and telomerase: a simple picture becomes complex." Cell 87(3):369-75.
Virta-Pearlman V, Morris DK, Lundblad V. (1996) "Est1 has the properties of a single-stranded telomere end-binding protein." Genes Dev. 10(24):3094-104.
Lendvay TS, Morris DK, Sah J, Balasubramanian B, Lundblad V. (1996) "Senescence mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a defect in telomere replication identify three additional EST genes." Genetics 144(4):1399-412.
Linger J, Hughes TR, Shevchenko A, Mann M, Lundblad V, Cech TR. )1997) "Reverse transcriptase motifs in the catalytic subunit of telomerase." Science. 276(5312):561-7.
References
- ^ a b c "Lundblad Victoria J. PhD". Baylor College of Medicine. Retrieved October 30, 2018.
- ^ a b c d e f g h "Victoria Lundblad". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved October 30, 2018.
- ^ a b c d e f Strauss, Evelyn. "Vicki Lundblad". Rockefeller University. Retrieved October 30, 2018.
- ^ a b c Hiltzik, Michael (February 1, 2018). "A gender discrimination case at the legendary Salk Institute exposes an ugly problem in science". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved October 30, 2018.
- S2CID 187110371. Retrieved October 30, 2018.
- ^ "American Academy of Microbiology Names 16 Women as Fellows". 18 August 2014.