Joan A. Steitz, PhD, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, will be the final speaker in the 2012 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Laureate Lecture Series, a yearlong program highlighting some of the top biomedical researchers in their fields. Dr. Steitz’s lecture, “Noncoding RNAs: With a Viral Twist,” will take place at noon on Tuesday, December 4, in Lecture Room 6, Scaife Hall.

Dr. Steitz earned her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard University in 1967. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in Cambridge, England, she joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale in 1970, working her way up from assistant professor to department chair (1996-1999).

Today, Dr. Steitz is best known for discovering and defining the function of small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs), cellular complexes that play a key role in splicing and processing pre-messenger RNA—the earliest product of DNA transcription. She has also discovered the roles that snRNPs play in autoimmune diseases, like lupus, and in the ability of herpes and other viruses to invade and reproduce within host cells.

Dr. Steitz is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. In 2006, she was selected as the fifth Rosalind E. Franklin Award Lecturer for Women in Science by the National Cancer Institute.

Among the many honors she has received are the National Medal of Science, the Gairdner Foundation International Award, and the Robert J. and Claire Pasarow Foundation 23rd Annual Medical Research Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research. She is associate editor of RNA and The Journal of Cell Biology and a member of the board of scientific counselors of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.