Bonnie Bassler, the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the biology department at Princeton University in New Jersey, has been selected to received the 2018 Dickson Prize in Medicine from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The award recognizes biomedical researchers who have made significant, progressive contributions to medicine.
Dr. Bassler discovered the universal use of chemical communication among bacteria and proposed that interfering with bacterial cell-to-cell communication could form the basis of new antibacterial therapies. She will be honored in Pittsburgh in October.
Professor Bassler has been on the faculty at Princeton University since 1994. In 2002, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She is a member of the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Dr. Bassler is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, where she majored in biochemistry. She holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.