Marilyn Kozak

Marilyn Kozak Ph.D. was a Professor of Biochemistry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She was previously at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey before the school was merged. She was awarded a Ph.D in Microbiology by Johns Hopkins University studying the synthesis of the Bacteriophage MS2, advised by Daniel Nathans. In her original faculty job proposal, she sought to study the mechanism of eukaryotic translation initiation, a problem long thought to have already been solved by Joan Steitz. While in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Pittsburgh, she published a series of studies that established the scanning model of translation initiation and the Kozak consensus sequence.