Wendy Gilbert is excited to join the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, coming from her previous post as an Associate Professor of Biology at MIT. Her love affair with molecular biology in general, and RNA in particular, began at Princeton, when she was an undergraduate studying alternative pre-mRNA splicing in Paul Schedl’s lab. She earned her PhD at UCSF with Christine Guthrie, studying mRNA export and being fascinated by the exquisite mechanisms that couple export-competence to completion of RNA processing. As a postdoc in Jennifer Doudna’s lab at UC Berkeley, she studied mechanisms and regulation of translation initiation. Since starting her own lab in 2008, Wendy has continued to study the features of mRNAs that control protein production. Research in Wendy’s laboratory is unified by her interest in RNA-dependent regulatory mechanisms and currently includes investigations of translation efficiency determinants, alternative 5′ UTRs, ribosomes, snoRNAs, and regulated RNA modifications. She was the inaugural winner of the RNA Society’s Early Career Award in 2017.
