Lucy Shapiro, who holds the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Chair in Cancer Research at the Stanford University School of Medicine, will share the 2012 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. The prize was established with an endowment from the will of the S. Gross Horwitz in honor of his mother. The prize is the university’s top award in the fields of biology and biochemistry. Of the 87 people who have been awarded the Horwitz Prize since 1967, 42 have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize.
Dr. Shapiro is being honored with her colleagues Joe Lutkenhaus of the University of Kansas School of Medicine and Richard Losick of Harvard University for their research on the three-dimensional organization of bacterial cells. The awards presentation will take place in New York this November.
Professor Shapiro also serves as director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford. She is a graduate of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York system and holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.