Lynne E. Maquat

Lynne Elizabeth Maquat is an American biochemist and molecular biologist who holds the J. Lowell Orbison endowed chair and is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, pediatrics and oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. She earned a bachelor degree in biology from the University of Connecticut in 1974 and a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1979, and her research was the first to describe nonsense-mediated messenger RNA decay, the cellular quality control pathway that degrades transcripts carrying premature stop codons, discovered the exon junction complex that helps mark those transcripts, and described related pathways called Staufen-mediated decay and microRNA-directed messenger RNA degradation. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and the National Academy of Medicine, received the Wiley Prize in 2018, the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2021, the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2023, and the Albany Medical Center Prize in 2024.