Joan A. Steitz

Steitz (born Joan Argetsinger) married Thomas Steitz, also Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, in 1966. They have one son, Jon.

Steitz has served in numerous professional capacities, including as scientific director of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research (1991–2002) and as editorial board member of Genes & Development.

In 1980, Steitz in collaboration with Michael Lerner published another critical paper, using immunoprecipitation with human antibodies from patients with autoimmunity to isolate and identify snRNPs (pronounced "snurps") and detect their role in splicing. A snRNP is a specific short length of RNA, around 150 nucleotides long, associated with protein, that is involved in splicing introns out of newly transcribed RNA (pre-mRNA), a component of the spliceosomes. Steitz's paper "set the field ahead by light years and heralded the avalanche of small RNAs that have since been discovered to play a role in multiple steps in RNA biosynthesis," noted Susan Berget.

In 1970, Steitz joined the faculty at Yale. In 1975, she published a research finding for which she is widely known, demonstrating that ribosomes use complementary base pairing to identify the start site on mRNA.

Steitz completed postdoctoral research at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge (UK), where she collaborated with Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner, and Mark Bretscher. At the LMB, Steitz focused on the question of how bacteria know where to start the "reading frame" on mRNA. In the process, Steitz discovered the exact sequences on a mature RNA virus encoding three proteins where the virus mRNA binds bacterial ribosomes to produce proteins. In 1969 she published a seminal paper in Nature showing the nucleotide sequence of the binding start points.

In 1963, Steitz received her Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Antioch College, Ohio, where she first became interested in molecular biology at Alex Rich's Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory as an Antioch "coop" intern.

Steitz was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She grew up in Minnesota in the 1950s and 60s at a time when there were no female role models in molecular biology. She attended the then all-girls Northrop Collegiate School for high school.

Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz (born January 26, 1941) is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins (snRNPs), which occur in eukaryotes. In September 2018, Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The Lasker award is often referred to as the 'American Nobel' because 87 of the former recipients have gone on to win Nobel prizes.