Professor Suzanne Cory, the former director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, has been named the recipient of the 2009 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize.
Professor Cory will receive her prize, created to recognise the accomplishments of outstanding female scientists, at The Rockefeller University in the US on 5 November.
The prize was founded by Rockefeller Nobel laureate Paul Greengard and his wife Ursula von Rydingsvard in honor of Professor Greengard's mother, Pearl Meister Greengard, who died giving birth to him. It has been awarded annually since 2004.
Previous recipients of the prize include 2009 Nobel Prize winners Professor Elizabeth Blackburn and Professor Carol Greider for their work on the enzyme telomerase; and developmental biologist Professor Nicole Marthe Le Douarin, who is renowned for her studies of chimeras.
The 2009 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize was awarded to Professor Cory for her work in cancer and immunogenetics.
Professor Cory has had a career-long scientific partnership with her husband Professor Jerry Adams. In the 1970s, they pioneered recombinant DNA technology in Australia, in order to investigate how immunoglobulin genes encode the antibodies needed to fight infectious agents.