Leemor Joshua-Tor is a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She received her B. S. in chemistry from Tel-Aviv University in Israel, and did her Ph.D. research with Joel Sussman at the Weizmann Institute working on aberrant structures of DNA. She then moved to Caltech for postdoctoral work with Prof. Douglas Rees. She joined the faculty at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1995.

Leemor’s research has focused on nucleic acid regulatory processes using the tools of structural biology and biochemistry to examine proteins and protein complexes associated with these processes. Her structural and biochemical studies on Argonaute identified this protein as “Slicer”, the enzyme in RISC that cleaves the mRNA as directed by the siRNA.