Salk Recruits Nobel Laureate Liz Blackburn as First Woman President

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies

The Salk Institute has named Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel laureate and UC San Francisco professor of biochemistry and biophysics, as its first woman president.

Blackburn has been a non-resident fellow at Salk since 2001, and will take over as president on Jan. 1. She is succeeding William Brody, a doctor and biomedical engineer who joined the prestigious biomedical research institute in 2009, after serving 12 years as president of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. Brody brought financial stability to the Salk, and nearly doubled the institute’s endowment to $356 million.

Blackburn, 66, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for elucidating the role of telomeres, the repetitive nucleotide sequences at the tips of chromosomes, and for discovering telomerase, an enzyme that replenishes telomeres. Her work brought new understanding about the function of telomeres in reproduction, and how telomeres play a central role in the effects of chronic stress, aging, and diseases like cancer.

Blackburn joined the faculty at UCSF in 1990 and served as chair of the microbiology and immunology department from 1993-99. In addition to the Nobel Prize, she has received nearly every major award in science, including the Lasker, Gruber, and Gairdner prizes.

Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth Blackburn

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.