Deborah K. Morrison

Deborah Kay Morrison is an American cell biologist who is the chief of the Laboratory of Cell and Developmental Signaling at the National Cancer Institute. She conducts research characterizing the RAS pathway and the RAF family kinases and leads efforts to design new therapeutic strategies for cancer treatment.

Education and early life Morrison was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She attended David Lipscomb College where she graduated with a degree in biology. Her 1985 dissertation was titled Characterization of the virion-associated RNA polymerase of rabbit poxvirus using monoclonal antibodies. She then began studying signal transduction as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Thomas M. Roberts at Harvard Medical School and Lewis T. Williams at the University of California, San Francisco. From 1996 to 1997, she was on sabbatical in the laboratory of Gerald M. Rubin at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has provided insights into the biochemical and structural basis of RAF activation and has guided the design of new therapeutic strategies.