Background and education
Cornish earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1991 while working under Professor Ronald Breslow. Her doctoral research focused on site-specific protein labeling and mutagenesis, which she conducted with Peter Schultz. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT through the National Science Foundation, working with Robert T. Sauer. Cornish is the first woman from Columbia College to be hired for a full-time faculty position since the college allowed both male and female students in 1983.
Research
Cornish and her lab group use tools from systems biology, synthetic biology, and DNA encoding to create desired chemical products from specific types of organisms. In 2016, she was part of a group of scientists who study genes and called for more research on ethics and self-guided rules as the costs and effort to create genomes from scratch decreased. After the "read" phase of the Human Genome Project was completed in 2004, this new project was named Genome Project-Write.
Awards
- In 2009, received the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry
- In 2009, received the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award
- In 2003, became a Sloan Foundation Fellow