Geraldine Seydoux

Geraldine C. Seydoux is an American biologist born June 18, 1964, in Paris, France, who is the Huntington Sheldon Professor in Medical Discovery at Johns Hopkins University, where she has been on the faculty since 1995, and serves as vice dean for basic research while working as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Her research on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans showed that messenger RNA synthesis must be shut down globally before the germ line can be established in the early embryo, and demonstrated that proteins carried by sperm trigger a reorganization of structural proteins within the egg that is essential for setting up the anterior-posterior axis of the embryo. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2001, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, and received the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2022.