Nancy Carrasco, MD

Nancy Carrasco received her M.D. and Masters in Biochemistry degrees from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and did her postdoctoral training at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology. She joined the Department of Molecular Pharmacology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine as a faculty member in 1987 and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at the Yale School of Medicine in 2011.

She is the recipient of the Pew Award in the Biomedical Sciences, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Award, the Maria Sibylla Merian Award (Germany), the Merck Prize from the European Thyroid Association (Poland), the Marshall S. Horwitz Faculty Award (New York), and the Light of Life Award (New York), among others. She delivered the Rose Pitt-Rivers Lecture (Scotland) and the American Thyroid Association Plenary Lecture (Canada), and was named Coleman Fellow in the Life Sciences (Israel), among many other honors. Her research on the Na+/I- symporter (NIS), the key plasma membrane protein that mediates active iodide transport in the thyroid, lactating breast, and other tissues, ranges from biochemical, biophysical, and physiological investigations to translational studies. She has served as president of the Society of Latin American Biophysicists. Dr. Carrasco was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.