Laura Landweber Topic

Laura Landweber is a Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Biological Sciences, and Systems Biology, in the Colleges of Physicians & Surgeons and Arts & Sciences. Prior to moving her lab to Columbia University Medical Center she was faculty at Princeton University from 1994-2016, and a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in 1993. She has authored over 150 publications in molecular and evolutionary biology and edited 3 books, in areas ranging from genetics and evolution to biological computation. She is President (2017) of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) and has served on several panels, working groups, and advisory committees for the NSF, NIH, and NASA, including co-chairing the NHGRI Comparative Genome Evolution Working Group from 2003-2007. Recent awards include a Guggenheim fellowship (2012) and a Blavatnik award for young scientists (2008), and she was elected a Fellow of AAAS for probing the diversity of genetic systems in microbial eukaryotes, including scrambled genes, RNA editing, variant genetic codes, and comparative genomics. Her work investigates the origin of novel genetic systems and complex genome architectures, using the ciliate Oxytricha as a model. Recent discoveries include the ability of small and long non-coding RNA molecules to program genome organization across generations, bypassing the information encoded in DNA.