Bonnie Bassler, the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology at Princeton University in New Jersey, has been awarded the 2023 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research. Dr. Bassler shares the prize with Jeffrey I. Gordon of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Dennis L. Kasper of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The award recognized the three as “scientists whose research has advanced the study and understanding of microbiomes and bacteria and how they communicate in the body and cause or prevent disease.”
The Albany Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research is one of the most prestigious awards in medicine and science in the United States. The $500,000 prize has been awarded annually since 2001 for exceptional work in medicine and biomedical research.
“I am grateful to and proud of the many scientists who have come through my lab to go on this scientific adventure with me,” said Dr. Bassler. “It has been a privilege and thrilling to work with the team as they try to change the perception of bacteria from being thought of as asocial loners to being considered sophisticated interacting organisms that, by acting as collectives, can have a profound influence on nature, health, and disease.”
Dr. Bassler first discovered that bacteria communicate during her postdoctoral work, and she has spent her career identifying and characterizing the molecules that bacteria use to coordinate collective behaviors and share other kinds of information.
Dr. Bassler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. She is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, where she majored in biochemistry and holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.