Buck received her Bachelor’s degree in psychology and microbiology in 1975 from the University of Washington, Seattle, and is the first female University of Washington alumnus to win the Nobel Prize. She received her PhD in immunology in 1980 at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. She then joined the lab of Richard Axel, studying the olfactory system. Their work uncovered how the human sense of smell operates at a molecular level, identifying the genes responsible for odor receptors and explaining how the brain interprets different scents. For this discovery, Buck and Axel shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Learn more at NobelPrize.org