Laura Landweber is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. With a research focus on molecular evolutionary biology, she has authored 150 publications and edited three books. Prior to her current position, she was a faculty member at Princeton University from 1994 to 2016 and served as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University. Throughout her career, she has held leadership roles including President of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2017. Her research investigates the origin of novel genetic systems and complex genome architectures using the ciliate Oxytricha as a model organism. Dr. Landweber's notable discoveries include the ability of small long non-coding RNA molecules to program genome organization across generations, demonstrating innovative processes that bypass typical DNA encoding. She has received numerous awards for her contributions to science, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 and the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2008, and she is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.