The Nobel Prize(@NobelPrize):Mary Brunkow, 2025 medicine laureate, was one of the first graduate students to join Princeton’s department of molecular biology. Her PhD adviser, Shirley Tilghman, remembers her as "incredibly bright and bold". At Princeton, Brunkow joined Tilghman’s lab, where she took on a project researching the mysterious H19 gene – a gene that is active in embryos but does not produce any protein. At a time when many scientists dismissed such “non-coding” genes as genetic leftovers, her findings helped demonstrate that H19 was not junk. Although largely unrelated to the work for which she has been awarded the Nobel Prize, her graduate research contributed to the current understanding of genomic imprinting – the process by which a gene can be turned on or off depending on whether it is inherited from the mother or the father. Learn about Brunkow's Nobel Prize-awarded discovery here:

2026.10.29 15:59

Mary Brunkow, 2025 medicine laureate, was one of the first graduate students to join Princeton’s department of molecular biology. Her PhD adviser, Shirley Tilghman, remembers her as "incredibly bright and bold". At Princeton, Brunkow joined Tilghman’s lab, where she took on a project researching the mysterious H19 gene – a gene that is active in embryos but does not produce any protein. At a time when many scientists dismissed such “non-coding” genes as genetic leftovers, her findings helped demonstrate that H19 was not junk. Although largely unrelated to the work for which she has been awarded the Nobel Prize, her graduate research contributed to the current understanding of genomic imprinting – the process by which a gene can be turned on or off depending on whether it is inherited from the mother or the father. Learn about Brunkow's Nobel Prize-awarded discovery here: