Elisa Izaurralde

Elisa Izaurralde (20 September 1959 in Montevideo, Uruguay – 30 April 2018 in Tübingen, Germany) was an Uruguayan biochemist and molecular biologist. She served as Director and Scientific Member of the Department of Biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen from 2005 until her death in 2018. In 2008, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, shared with Elena Conti, for "fundamental new insights into intracellular RNA transport and RNA metabolism". Together with Conti, she helped characterize proteins important for exporting mRNA out of the nucleus

Early life and education Elisa Izaurralde was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on 20 September 1959. At the age of 17 she left Uruguay to pursue an education at Geneva University in Switzerland. After undergraduate training in biochemistry, she went on to receive a PhD in molecular biology in 1989, for work on chromatin organization she performed under the guidance of Ulrich Laemmli.

Career After receiving her PhD, Izaurralde stayed on in Laemmli's lab for an additional year as a postdoctoral researcher before starting a second postdoctoral position at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg in 1990, working with Iain Mattaj. It was here that she switched her focus from DNA to RNA and met biophysicist Elena Conti, with whom she would share the 2008 Leibniz Prize.

Research In order to make a protein, genetic information in DNA is copied (transcribed) into messenger RNA (mRNA) in the nucleus and then exported into the cytoplasm, where it is translated into a protein. Much of Izaurralde's early career focused on elucidating how this export occurs at a molecular level.

Awards and honors Friedrich Miescher Award, Swiss Society for Biochemistry, 1999 European Life Scientist Organization (ELSO) Young Scientist Award, 2000 Elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), 2000 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, German Research Foundation, 2008 Elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, 2009 Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine, Jung Foundation for Science and Research, 2012

Selected publications