Elisa Izaurralde (20 September 1959 in Montevideo, Uruguay – 30 April 2018 in Tübingen, Germany) was an Uruguayan biochemist and molecular biologist.
She served as Director and Scientific Member of the Department of Biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen from 2005 until her death in 2018.
[4] After undergraduate training in biochemistry, she went on to receive a PhD in molecular biology in 1989, for work on chromatin organization she performed under the guidance of Ulrich Laemmli.
[6] It was here that she switched her focus from DNA to RNA and met biophysicist Elena Conti, with whom she would share the 2008 Leibniz Prize.
[4] Izaurralde worked as a group leader and later a senior scientist at EMBL before becoming Director of the Biochemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in 2005.