Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn is a leader in the area of telomere and telomerase research, and has made key discoveries in different aspects of telomere function and biology. In 1985, she discovered the ribonucleoprotein enzyme, telomerase, and since that time, hers has become a lead laboratory in manipulating and studying telomerase activity in cells. Having amassed considerable knowledge and experience in the effects this has on cells, Dr. Blackburn and her research team at the University of California, San Francisco are working with a variety of organisms and human cells, especially cancer cells, with the goal of understanding telomerase and telomere biology. Her work on telomeres and telomerase has been published extensively in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Blackburn earned her B.Sc. (1970) and M.Sc. (1972) degrees from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and her Ph.D. (1975) from the University of Cambridge in England. She did her postdoctoral work in Molecular and Cellular Biology from 1975 to 1977 at Yale.

In 1978, Dr. Blackburn joined the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of California Berkeley. In 1990, she joined the Departments of Microbiology and Immunology, and Biochemistry and Biophysics, at the University of California San Francisco, and she as Department Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 1993 to 1999. Dr. Blackburn is currently the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF, and also a Non-Resident Fellow of the Salk Institute.

Dr. Blackburn is an elected Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (1993), and an elected Member of the Institute of Medicine (2000). She is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the Royal Society of London (1992), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2000).