Dr. Susan Lindquist of the Whitehead Institute has been awarded the National Medal of Science this week in a ceremony at the White House. Dr. Lindquist has been the recipient of a Children’s Tumor Foundation Drug Discovery Award, and she gave the opening Keynote Lecture at the 2010 NF Conference in Baltimore, MD in June.
The National Medal of Science is given annually to a small number of select scientists by the National Science Foundation. The 2010 Award recognizes Dr. Lindquist’s overall focus on understanding how proteins folds, which could have broad reaching applications in medicine and biotechnology. Her neurofibromatosis-focused work has looked at heat shock proteins and their potential role in NF1.
