Laura Landweber

Research career In 1994, Landweber became a faculty member of Princeton University at the age of 26.

In a 2000 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on biocomputers, Landweber solved chess's knights problem, where one determines how many non-attacking knights can be placed on a chessboard, using a test tube of RNA, a breakthrough in DNA computing.

Laura Landweber has also studied the evolution of the genetic code and the scrambled genomes of ciliates such as Oxytricha. Her laboratory has supported the notion that the code was no accident but arose from affinities between the nucleic acid codons and their cognate amino acids.

Publications (books) DNA Based Computers II (1998), Landweber, L. and Baum, E., eds, American Mathematicsl Society Genetics and the Extinction of Species: DNA and the Conservation of Biodiversity (1999), Landweber, L. F. and Dobson, A. P., eds, Princeton University Press Evolution as Computation (2003), Landweber, L. F. and Winfree, E., eds, Springer Verlag 2001 - Tulip Award for DNA Computing 2005 - American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow 2008 - Regional Award Winner, Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, The New York Academy of Sciences 2012 - Guggenheim Fellow 2014 - Division R Lecturer, American Society for Microbiology

Personal life Laura Landweber was married to physicist Steven Gubser