On Sept. 11, 2018, Joan Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, received the 2018ﾠ Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science for her pioneering role in expanding our understanding of RNA biology and her lifelong advocacy for inclusion of women in the sciences.

The award was one of the three announced by the foundation. The Lasker Awards are among the most prestigious prizes given in medicine and recognize the contributions of leaders who made major advances in the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevention of human disease. Each award carries a $250,000 honorarium.

Steitz’s career has spanned four decades of breakthrough advances in molecular biology and, more recently, of promoting women in science. The Minneapolis native was a pioneer in the study of RNA, which she began a decade after James Watson and Francis Crick made their groundbreaking discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. Watson and Joseph Gall, then at the University of Minnesota, were instrumental in convincing Steitz to forego medical school and follow her passion to work as a research scientist at a time when few women were involved in research.