Daniel Nathans Professor and Director, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and Professor of Oncology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD Greider, one of the world's pioneering researchers on the structure of telomeres, was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak. While a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, working together with Blackburn, Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase and later, in her own lab, she cloned its RNA component. This work laid the foundation for studies that have linked telomerase and telomeres to human cancer and age-related degenerative disease; it represents another example of curiosity-driven basic research that has direct medical implications. Greider obtained her Ph.D. degree in molecular biology from Berkeley in 1987. She then went to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where she ran a lab for 10 years studying telomerase. In 1997 she joined the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Greider grew up in Davis, Calif., where her father was a physicist at the University of California. She credits her father for encouraging her to pursue what most excited her.