Laura Landweber is a Professor at Princeton University's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Visiting Professor at Columbia University, where her lab is moving in 2016. After earning an A.B. from Princeton in 1989, and a PhD from Harvard University in 1993, she was briefly a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, before securing a faculty position in 1994. Since then, she has received a number of awards, and has been elected a Fellow of AAAS. Following work on RNA editing, the origin of the genetic code and on biological computers, her lab currently focuses on the genome gymnastics of ciliates. Despite being single-celled, these organisms contain two genomes, the smaller of which is derived from the larger by a complex cut-and-paste unscrambling process.