Lydia Villa-Komaroff (born August 7, 1947) is a molecular and cellular biologist who has been an academic laboratory scientist, a university administrator, and a business woman.

Her PhD dissertation, under the supervision of Harvey Lodish and Nobel laureate David Baltimore, focused on how proteins are produced from RNA in poliovirus.

She then went to Harvard to conduct her postdoctoral research for three years, focusing on recombinant DNA technology, under the supervision of Fotis Kafatos and Tom Maniatis.

When Cambridge banned such experiments in 1976, citing worries about public safety and the chance of unintentionally creating a new disease, Villa-Komaroff moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Villa-Komaroff felt that these failures aided in her biggest victory: six months after she was able to return to Harvard (once the ban on recombinant DNA experiments was lifted in 1977), she became a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert.

There, she continued to establish her name in molecular biology, and in 1995 a television documentary called "DNA Detective" featured her work on insulin-related growth factors.

Villa-Komaroff's laboratory showed that exposing dark-reared cats to one hour of light caused a 2 to 3 fold transient induction of three specific proteins.

[12] Finally, Villa-Komaroff contributed to the discovery that a molecule known to be associated with Alzheimer's disease (amyloid beta) causes degeneration of brain cells (neurons), work done in conjunction with a postdoctoral fellow in her laboratory, Bruce Yankner.