biology

Laura Landweber

Laura Landweber is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Laura Landweber rather than just read about it. In short: Laura Faye Landweber is an American evolutionary biologist. As of 2016, she is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of biological sciences at Columbia University.

Key takeaways

Laura Landweber belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Laura Landweber to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Laura Landweber from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Laura Faye Landweber is an American evolutionary biologist. As of 2016, she is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of biological sciences at Columbia University. Previously, she was a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. She specializes in RNA-mediated epigenetic inheritance and molecular evolution.

Education Landweber graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in molecular biology from Princeton University in 1989 after completing a 50-page-long senior thesis titled "A Method for Evolutionary Sequence Analysis of Genes and Pseudogenes Using the Polymerase Chain Reaction: Applications to the Mouse Tcp-1 Gene" in which she described linear PCR. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Her doctoral dissertation is titled "RNA editing and the evolution of mitochondrial DNA in kinetoplastid protozoa."

Research career In 1994, Landweber became a faculty member of Princeton University at the age of 26. In a 2000 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on biocomputers, Landweber solved chess's knights problem, where one determines how many non-attacking knights can be placed on a chessboard, using a test tube of RNA, a breakthrough in DNA computing. Laura Landweber has also studied the evolution of the genetic code and the scrambled genomes of ciliates such as Oxytricha. Her laboratory has supported the notion that the code was no accident but arose from affinities between the nucleic acid codons and their cognate amino acids. Her studies of the massive rearrangements of the genome in the micronucleus of Oxytricha showed an unsuspected role for non-coding RNA in directing the process epigenetically.

Publications (books) DNA Based Computers II (1998), Landweber, L. and Baum, E., eds, American Mathematicsl Society Genetics and the Extinction of Species: DNA and the Conservation of Biodiversity (1999), Landweber, L. F. and Dobson, A. P., eds, Princeton University Press Evolution as Computation (2003), Landweber, L. F. and Winfree, E., eds, Springer Verlag

Awards and honors 1999 – Sigma Xi Young Investigator Award 2001 - Tulip Award for DNA Computing 2005 - American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow 2008 - Regional Award Winner, Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, The New York Academy of Sciences 2012 - Guggenheim Fellow 2014 - Division R Lecturer, American Society for Microbiology 2017 - President, Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution

Personal life Laura Landweber was married to physicist Steven Gubser and has three daughters.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Laura Landweber

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Laura Landweber claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Laura Landweber before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Laura Landweber ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Laura Landweber

In research: Laura Landweber appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Laura Landweber in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Laura Landweber is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics American evolutionary biologists, American women evolutionary biologists, DNA nanotechnology people, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Laura Landweber outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Laura Landweber in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Laura Landweber means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Laura Landweber out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Laura Landweber in simple terms?

Laura Faye Landweber is an American evolutionary biologist. As of 2016, she is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of biological sciences at Columbia University.

Why does Laura Landweber matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Laura Landweber?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Laura Landweber.