Lynne Elizabeth Maquat is an American biochemist and molecular biologist whose research focuses on the cellular mechanisms of human disease.

[3] She currently holds the J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, pediatrics and oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

[4] Maquat graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of Connecticut in 1974.

Her research Specifically, she was the first to describe nonsense-mediated mRNA decay, work that enabled the discovery of the exon junction complex as a critical quality-control mechanism in the cell.

She also described Staufen-mediated mRNA decay, a competitive process to NMD, and microRNA degradation.