Printer Friendly Version - Dr. Joan Steitz Wins Mass General Honor

Dr. Joan Steitz has received the 2016 Jonathan Kraft Prize for Excellence awarded by Mass General’s Cancer Center (l-r): Mass General Hospital president Dr. Peter Slavin, Jonathan Kraft, Dr. Joan Steitz, Robert Kraft, and Dr. Daniel Haber, director of the Cancer Center. Photo courtesy CURE

Stony Creek resident Joan A. Steitz, PhD is one of the world's leading scientists and was recently recognized, yet again, for contributions to her field. Among her long list of recognitions and honors is a Gairdner Foundation Award (2006), which many consider a precursor to the Nobel Prize.

According to a press release issued by CT-based CURE on June 1, Dr. Steitz received the 2016 Jonathan Kraft Prize for Excellence. Since 2006, the prize has been been awarded annually by Massachusetts General Hospital's Cancer Center.　

Last year, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Technology awarded Dr. Steitz the Connecticut Medal of Science, the state's highest recognition. Dr. Steitz won the National Medal of Science in 1986.

At Yale University, Dr. Steitz is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Steitz is married to 2009 Nobel Prize Winner (Chemistry) Tom Steitz, who applauded his wife's important work in a 2009 article in The Sound, saying, "I don't know if there's a more accomplished female scientist in the world." View the entire article here

"As a college student in the 1960s, Joan Steitz never imagined herself as a top-flight scientist. Certainly, she was fascinated by science. She even assisted senior scientists in laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was befriended by James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, and at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. But when it came time to choose a career path, she had never seen a female professor or head of lab. So, she never aspired to such goals.

Today, Prof. Joan Steitz is one of leading scientists in her field. Steitz is best known for her pioneering work in RNA. She and her student Michael Lerner discovered and defined the function of small ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs) in pre-messenger RNA—the earliest product of DNA transcription—and was the first to learn that these cellular complexes (snRNPs) play a key role in processing messenger RNA by excising noncoding regions and splicing together the resulting segments. Her breakthroughs into the previously mysterious splicing process have clarified the science behind the formation of proteins and other biological processes, including the intricate changes that occur as the immune system and brain develop. Steitz earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1967. After completing postdoctoral work in Cambridge, England, she joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale as an assistant professor and later became an associate and full professor, as well as chair of the department."