Dr Lorraine Symington is the Harold S. Ginsberg Professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York. Dr Symington is a yeast geneticist who has made major contributions to understanding how broken chromosomes are repaired. Her work has focused on mechanisms of homologous recombination, a DNA repair process that is frequently disturbed in cancer cells. She solved the longstanding question of how DNA double-strand breaks are processed to activate homologous recombination. She discovered several of the evolutionarily conserved factors that act in the process.
Dr Symington received her B.Sc. degree in Biology from the University of Sussex, and Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Glasgow. After postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago, she joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1988. Dr Symington is an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Professional position
- Harold S Ginsberg Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Columbia University
Subject groups
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Molecules of Life
Biochemistry and molecular biology
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Cell Biology
Genetics (excluding population genetics)
