Professor Ruth Lehmann

A developmental geneticist and cell biologist, Ruth Lehmann studies the biology of reproductive cells. Her research has illuminated how germ cells, the precursors of egg and sperm, control reproduction from generation to generation.

Lehmann received her Ph.D. with Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard at the Max Plank Institute in Tübingen, Germany. After postdoctoral training at Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK, she joined the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research and the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1996 she was recruited to the then newly founded Skirball Institute at NYU Langone Health. She was Chair of the department of Cell Biology and directed the Skirball Institute at NYU Langone until 2020, when she re-joined the Whitehead Institute as its director and MIT as professor of Biology. She was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1990-1996 and from 1997-2020.

Dr. Lehmann is a member of the American Academy of Arts Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, Member of EMBO and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Recent awards include in 2021: in Vilcek Award, the Amory Award from the American Academy of Sciences, and the TH Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America; and in 2022 the Gruber Prize in Genetics and the Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science.