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Elizabeth Blackburn, in full Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, (born November 26, 1948, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia), Australian-born American.

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Her parents were family doctors. Blackburn was the second child of eventually seven siblings. Since she was little she loved animals and nature.

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In the early 1970s Blackburn earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Melbourne.

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She received a Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1975, and that same year she began her postdoctoral research in the laboratory of American cell biologist and geneticist Joseph Gall, at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

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In 1978 Blackburn became an assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and continued her investigations of the telomeres of Tetrahymena.

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In 1980 Szostak and Blackburn began a collaborative effort to understand the function of telomeres.

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In 1984 discovered telomerase. Their subsequent studies revealed that telomerase plays a fundamental role in maintaining chromosomes because it can add DNA to telomeres, which shorten following cell division and are the primary determinants of cell life span.

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From 1993 to 1999, she was chair of the UCSF department of microbiology and immunology.

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For their research and contributions to the understanding of telomeres and the enzyme telomerase, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostaks received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Blackburn served as the first female president of the Salk Institute (2016-18).