Marcia Carmen Haigis is an American biologist and professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School.
[1] During her undergraduate studies Haigis discovered medical research, and spent her summers as a lab intern working on protein chemistry.
Haigis has demonstrated the role of mitochondrial sirtuins (a protein family involved in the regulation of biological processes) in metabolism and disease.
[1] She has shown that damage to DNA (which can accelerate cancer) activates the SIRT4 gene, and mice lacking SIRT4 developed spontaneous lung tumors.
[1] Her lab also demonstrated that prolyl-hydroxylase 3 (PHD3), a signaling enzyme, breaks down fats inside the mitochondrion, and is suppressed in a subset of cancers (including acute myeloid leukemia).