Hopkins researcher Carol Greider is the co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Greider helped discovered telomerase, an enzyme that helps protect chromosome ends against damage.
This discovery and her subsequent research has helped discover the connection between telomerase and diseases relating to cancer and aging.
Greider is a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the School of Medicine. She becomes the 33rd Hopkins affiliate to win a Nobel.
Hopkins President Ronald Daniels offered his "heartiest congratulations" to Greider.
"Carol's profoundly important work, its impact on science and its increasing implications for human health exemplify the Johns Hopkins mission in advancing knowledge for the sake of our world," he wrote in an email broadcast to the University.
Greider shares the award with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak. Blackburn was a graduate advisor to Greider when the two discovered telomerase in 1984.
This marks the first time that two women have won the medicine prize in the same year.
Blackburn is a biology and physiology professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Szostak is a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School.
Greider will join her co-recipients for the award ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, where they will also be rewarded $1.4 million.
Their research was previously recognized in 2006, when they share the Lasker Award - a prize recently awarded to Hopkins alumus Charles Sawyer for his development in leukemia treatment.
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