Born on the island of Tasmania, Australia, Elizabeth Blackburn was fascinated with animals and nature, and went on to study biochemistry at the University of Melbourne. She earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge in England and did her postdoctoral work in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Yale. In 1978, Blackburn joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, researching the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. For her work with Jack Szostak on the molecular structure of telomeres, and co-discovery of telomerase with Carol W. Greider, she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009. She is the first Australian woman Nobel laureate.
