Carol W. Greider, a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Greider shares the Nobel with Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak. The three were honored for the discovery of "how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase."

Greider, 48, graduated from UCSB in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in biology from the College of Creative Studies, and earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1987 from the University of California, Berkeley, where Blackburn was her supervisor. Greider is currently a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she has been since 1997. Greider was born in 1961 in San Diego. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, she did postdoctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a nonprofit research institute in New York.