Judith Kimble is a Vilas Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
In 1983, she joined the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has stayed in Madison since. Kimble is best known for identification of a stem cell niche in the nematode C. elegans and subsequent analyses of genes, molecules, pathways and networks that regulate the stem cell niche, stem cell fate and sex determination. She was selected as an HHMI investigator in 1994 and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995. She has served the biomedical research community in numerous capacities, most recently as Chair of the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science and a member of a recently formed National Research Council (NRC) committee tackling issues critical for Next Generation Researchers.
She did undergraduate studies at the University of California-Berkeley and then taught histology at the University of Copenhagen Medical School for two years while doing research on fetal development. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1978, and then went to Cambridge UK as a postdoc at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
