Dr. Tilghman is Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology and Director of the Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She obtained her B.Sc. degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. After teaching secondary school in Sierra Leone, West Africa, for two years, she earned her Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Temple University. Her postdoctoral work was done with Philip Leder at NIH. Before joining the faculty at Princeton, she held positions at Temple University and the Institute for Cancer Research. Dr. Tilghman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Shirley Tilghman is interested in the function and mechanism of genomic imprinting and genes that regulate embryonic development in the mouse.