Nancy Kleckner

Nancy Kleckner is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology at Harvard University.

She worked with Matt Meselson as an undergraduate at Harvard University, earning her degree in 1968. She then moved on to do her PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with Ethan Signer on the genetics of lambda phage and DNA replication.[1] She did a postdoc under David Botstein at Princeton University in 1974. She returned to Harvard as a professor in 1977 and was awarded tenure in 1985.[2] Her first graduate student at Harvard was Victoria Lundblad, who discovered the gene-enzyme systems of yeast that control formation of telomeres, chromosome ends.[3]

Her work in transposons and mutagenesis has been largely productive, and led her to study the physical mechanism of chromosome replication.[2] She discovered SeqA, a protein involved in initiation of DNA replication.