Greider grew up in Davis, Calif., where her father was a physicist at the University of California. He was her role model for her pursuit of scientific research and the "academic freedom and the importance of liking what you do," she said. Greider graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a bachelor's degree in biology in 1983 and earned a doctorate in molecular biology in 1987 from the University of California, Berkeley. After working at a laboratory in New York, she came in 1997 to Hopkins, where she is the Daniel Nathans professor and director of molecular biology and genetics at the Hopkins Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.
In 2006, she won the Lasker Award, nicknamed the "American Nobel," for her work with telomerase.
Dang said Greider reminds him of the late Nathans, another "classic scientist" who won the Nobel Prize in 1978 along with Hamilton O. Smith, both Hopkins faculty members.
"This award recognizes work of incomparable originality and insight," said Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels. "Carol's work really demonstrates how all of our aspirations and hopes for our colleagues can be fulfilled in such a dramatic and arresting way."
She's also a role model for a new generation of scientists, said Agre. "Young scientists have to realize Carol was in graduate school: On her first rotation she did an experiment that changed everything," he said. "So science is for young people."
Recent Nobel Prize winners in science and medicine affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University
* Carol Greider
Daniel Nathans professor and director of molecular biology and genetics
Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
* Andrew Fire
Adjunct professor of biology
Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2006
* Dr. Richard Axel
1971 medical school graduate
Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2004
* Dr. Peter Agre
Director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2003
* Paul Greengard
Ph.D. in biophysics, 1953
Nobel Prize in Medicine, 2000
