Marilyn Kozak

Marilyn S. Kozak is an American professor of biochemistry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She was previously at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey before the school was merged. She was awarded a PhD in microbiology by Johns Hopkins University studying the synthesis of the Bacteriophage MS2, advised by Daniel Nathans.

Kozak sought to study the mechanism of eukaryotic translation initiation, a problem long thought to have already been solved by Joan Steitz. While in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Pittsburgh, she published a series of studies that established the scanning model of translation initiation and the Kozak consensus sequence. Her last publication was in 2008.

Recognition

Kozak was listed as one of the top 10 Women Scientists of the 1980s in an article published by The Scientist magazine, based on the number of citations for their published work between 1981 and 1988. During this time, Kozak had 3,107 citations.

Controversy

In March 2001, Kozak published a mini-review in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Biology entitled "New Ways of Initiating Translation in Eukaryotes?" that resulted in push-back from the scientific community. In her publication, Kozak discussed her hesitation towards the role of cellular internal ribosome entry sites (IRES). This was most heavily refuted by Robert Schneider, who published a response article of the same name in the same journal in December 2001. In this response, Schneider claimed that in publishing her mini-review, Kozak hoped to increase the validity of her own findings. He further stated that Kozak's publication was not up to scholarly standards and should not have been accepted into the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Contributions Along with her published work, Kozak has contributed to the scientific community with her role on the editorial board for the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Biology. She has been listed intermittently as an editor between the years 1983 and 1991.

Selected works This is a selection of Kozak's work but not a complete list.

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