Susan Lindquist

First Person | Susan Lindquist

Courtesy of Susan Lindquist

She holds seminars on how to balance family and career, loves to tango Argentine style, and admits willingly that she would consider working as a journalist. But Susan Lindquist, 52, the first female director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, chose her first path--love of science--as her career, and that has landed her in an enviable spot. A highly cited author who is interested in stress response and protein folding, Lindquist and company use genetics, molecular and cell biology analyses, and biophysical methods to understand the mechanisms of prion propagation, generation of diversity, and human disease. "Biology is no longer a descriptive science," she told Biomaterial World last February. "Rather, it's a science where you really try to understand on a molecular level how life's processes work--and that's truly an extraordinary problem."

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