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.