Bonnie Bassler, the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the department of molecular biology at Princeton University in New Jersey was named 2015 Shaw Laureate in life science and medicine by the Hong Kong-based Shaw Foundation. Professor Bassler will share the $1 million Shaw Prize with E. Peter Greenberg, a professor of microbiology at the University of Washington. The award will presented in Hong Kong this coming September.
Professor Bassler is being recognized by the Shaw Foundation for her work in quorum sensing, a process that bacteria use for cell-to-cell communication. The foundation stated in the prize citation that Dr. Bassler’s research “offers innovative ways to interfere with bacterial pathogens or to modulate the microbiome for health applications.”
Dr. Bassler joined the Princeton faculty in 1994. She is a graduate of the University of California, Davis and holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.