Nancy Kedersha

From 1983 to 1988 Kedersha worked as a post doctoral fellow in Leonard Rome's lab at UCLA.^[3] In collaboration with Rome, she co-discovered the vault (organelle).^[8] The vault is this large cytoplasmic organelle found in eukaryotes, but whose function has not fully been elucidated.^[9] Recent studies done in trypanosome suggest it plays a role in trans-spliced mRNA.^[10]

After her post-doctoral fellowship, Kedersha worked briefly in industry for ImmunoGen Inc. using microscopy to study cancer cells. She returned to academia where she became an instructor of medicine within Paul Anderson's lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital and studied stress granules.^[11][12][13] While there, she became the director of the confocal microscopy core.^[7] She also co-wrote a chapter in Translation Mechanisms and Control.^[14]

Kedersha has placed ten times in the Nikon Small World competition in which four of those times she was a finalist.^[15] She has also won the prestigious Lennart Nilsson Award in 2011 for her work in fluorescence microscopy.^[7][16][17]

Nancy Kedersha's colour images open our eyes to the smallest components of life. Through her work she has pushed cell biology into new scientific, pedagogical and aesthetic realms. With the aid of a confocal microscope, she has turned biological data into an artistic experience.