Nancy Maguire

Nancy Maguire. Nancy Maguire is a distinguished biochemist and molecular biologist renowned for her pioneering research into the mechanisms of protein folding and cellular signal transduction. Her work has significantly advanced the understanding of enzyme kinetics and has had profound implications for the study of neurodegenerative disease and cancer biology. Maguire's career, spanning several decades at premier institutions like the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, has been marked by numerous accolades, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the prestigious Lasker Award.

Early life and education

Maguire was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and demonstrated an early aptitude for the sciences. She completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she conducted research under the mentorship of Nobel laureate Robert Lefkowitz. She subsequently earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University, working in the laboratory of X-ray crystallography pioneer Dorothy Hodgkin. Her doctoral thesis on the allosteric regulation of aspartate transcarbamoylase laid the groundwork for her future investigations into protein structure and function.

Career

Following her postdoctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, Maguire joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. She later accepted a professorship at Stanford University in its School of Medicine, where she also served as director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. Throughout her tenure, she has held visiting scholar positions at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany. Maguire has also contributed to national science policy through her service on the National Institutes of Health's National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council.

Research and contributions

Maguire's research has fundamentally elucidated the thermodynamics and kinetics of protein folding pathways, using innovative techniques such as hydrogen–deuterium exchange and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Her laboratory's discovery of a key chaperone protein involved in preventing amyloid aggregation provided critical insights into diseases like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. In the field of signal transduction, she mapped a novel phosphorylation cascade linking G protein-coupled receptor activation to gene expression changes, a pathway frequently dysregulated in metastasis. Her work is extensively cited in foundational texts like Molecular Biology of the Cell and has influenced drug discovery efforts at Genentech and Pfizer.

Awards and honors

Maguire's scientific achievements have been recognized with numerous national and international awards. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, often called the "genius grant," and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of London. Other notable honors include the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Gairdner Foundation International Award, and the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize. She has delivered prestigious named lectures, including the Harvey Lecture at the Rockefeller University.

Personal life

Maguire is married to structural biologist David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington. They have two children. An advocate for women in science, she has been actively involved with the Association for Women in Science and mentors through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Gilliam Fellows Program. Outside of her professional life, she is an accomplished classical pianist and has performed in benefit concerts for the San Francisco Symphony.

Category:American biochemists Category:Molecular biologists Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Lasker Award recipients