Victoria Lundblad

Victoria Lundblad is an American geneticist whose work focuses on the genetic control of chromosome behavior in yeast. Many of her discoveries have concerned telomerase, the RNA-containing enzyme that completes the ends of chromosomes.

Early life and education Victoria Lundblad was born in the Bay Area of California to a biochemist and a school teacher. She then took up playing the cello and threw herself into music studies; arriving at University of California, Berkeley, Salk Institute responded that Lundblad was "consistently ranking below her peers in producing high quality research and attracting" grant support and that each of the three professors ranked in "the bottom quartile of her peers".

In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology — one of 16 women out of the 88 new fellows that year.

Honors and awards 1997 DeBakey Excellence in Research Award from Baylor College of Medicine 2008 Pearl Mester Greengard Prize from Rockefeller University. 2015 National Academy of Sciences in Medical Genetics, Hematology, and Oncology

Selected works Nugent CI, Hughes TR, Lue NF, Lundblad V.(1996) "Cdc13p: a single-strand telomeric DNA-binding protein with a dual role in yeast telomere maintenance." Science 274(5285):249-52.

Lundblad V, Wright WE. (1996) "Telomeres and telomerase: a simple picture becomes complex." Cell 87(3):369-75.

Virta-Pearlman V, Morris DK, Lundblad V. (1996) "Est1 has the properties of a single-stranded telomere end-binding protein." Genes Dev. 10(24):3094-104.

Lendvay TS, Morris DK, Sah J, Balasubramanian B, Lundblad V. (1996) "Senescence mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a defect in telomere replication identify three additional EST genes." Genetics 144(4):1399-412.

Linger J, Hughes TR, Shevchenko A, Mann M, Lundblad V, Cech TR. )1997) "Reverse transcriptase motifs in the catalytic subunit of telomerase." Science. 276(5312):561-7.