Columbia University honors Shapiro with Horwitz Prize
Lucy Shapiro
Lucy Shapiro, PhD, is one of three recipients of the 2012 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize awarded by Columbia University. Shapiro, a professor of developmental biology at the School of Medicine, and her colleagues Richard Losick, PhD, from Harvard, and Joe Lutkenhaus, PhD, from the University of Kansas Medical School, were recognized for their work on the three-dimensional organization of bacteria cells. Established in 1967, the Horwitz Prize is Columbia University's top honor for achievement in biological and biochemistry research.
"It is a great honor to receive the Louisa Gross Horwitz Award," said Shapiro, who is the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Chair in Cancer Research in the Department of Developmental biology and the director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. "The work recognized by this award is the culmination of the shared intellectual input and vision of a large group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with whom I've had the pleasure of sharing the passion and joy of scientific discovery.
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"Particularly important has been the establishment and flowering of an interdisciplinary lab at Stanford in collaboration with Harley McAdams, a physicist who is a professor in the Department of Developmental Biology where we run an integrated lab with physicists and engineers working side by side with molecular geneticists and cell biologists," she said. (McAdams and Shapiro's relationship goes beyond the lab; they also are married.)
In particular, Shapiro's work focuses on understanding how the linear DNA molecule can encode all of the instructions necessary for generating a three-dimensional bacterial cell in which proteins and cellular structures are precisely located. She also showed that progression through the cell cycle requires complex genetic circuitry leading to the whole cell integration of sequential biochemical events. She discovered the mechanisms that define cell polarity and asymmetric cell division, and her work has provided a powerful model of the regulatory events shared between bacteria and stem cells in more complex organisms.
"We congratulate Drs. Losick, Lutkenhaus and Shapiro on their important work that has expanded understanding of the life of a cell and are pleased to award them our 2012 Horwitz Prize," said Lee Goldman, MD, dean of the faculties of health sciences and medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences at Columbia University, in a news release. "In this 45th year since the prize was established, these awardees join an elite group of scientists who have contributed greatly to the basic science that is the foundation of efforts to better understand diseases, develop new treatments, and improve the lives of patients."
"The research of these three superb pioneers has led to major insights into the biochemistry and molecular biology of the living cell. It has helped establish the simple bacterial cell as one of the most powerful models for understanding the cycle of cell life and death," said Gerard Karsenty, MD, PhD, chair of the Horwitz Prize Committee and chair of the Department of Genetics and Development at Columbia University Medical Center.
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