Dr. Lynne Maquat is the J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the School of Medicine and Dentistry, Director of the Center for RNA Biology, and Chair of Graduate Women in Science at the University of Rochester. She received her B.A. in Biology from the University of Connecticut in 1974 and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1979. Maquat conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she worked as a faculty member at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute for 19 years before joining the faculty at the University of Rochester. She has published more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals and edited numerous books. Research in Maquat’s lab focuses on human diseases and what causes diseases in our cells. She is working to understand how cells function normally, determine what causes diseases, and develop treatments for diseases. In particular, she has been studying a process in cells that causes about one-third of all inherited diseases, like cystic fibrosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy, as well as one-third of all acquired diseases, including cancer. She is particularly interested in RNA pathways. Through her studies of human diseases, Maquat discovered a pathway called nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) in 1981, a quality-control mechanism that eliminates potentially deleterious RNA molecules. Her laboratory has worked out how our cells recognize potentially deleterious RNAs, which are produced all the time by mistake in normal cells. Subsequent studies have focused on other types of disease-associated RNAs, including two types of regulatory RNAs: long non-coding RNAs and very short regulatory RNAs called microRNAs. Research in the Maquat lab utilizes biochemistry, molecular biology, structural biology, genome editing, transcriptomics, proteomics, and computational biology to study RNA metabolism in human and mouse cells, with a focus on RNA metabolism in human health and disease. Maquat has received numerous awards and honors during her career, including the International RNA Society Lifetime Achievement in Science Award, the Canada Gairdner International Award, the William Rose Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Athena Award from the Women’s Council of the Rochester Business Alliance, a MERIT Award from the NIH, the Presidential Diversity Award from the University of Rochester, the RNA Society Lifetime Achievement Award in Service, and many others. She was also named a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Batsheva de Rothschild Fellow of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.