Frederick M. Ausubel

Frederick M Ausubel (born September 2, 1945) is an American molecular biologist and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston and is the Karl Winnacker Distinguished Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston., Massachusetts.

Ausubel obtained his undergraduate degree in 1966 at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. in Biology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ausubel's scientific work concerns host-microbe interactions. In the 1970s and 1980s, his laboratory worked on the molecular basis of symbiotic nitrogen fixation, the process by which legumes, in concert with a bacterial symbiont, convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Over the last 20 years, Ausubel's lab has worked on the development of so-called multi-host pathogenesis systems that involve the infection of hosts, including the well-studied nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana, with a variety of bacterial and fungal pathogens. His research helped elucidate the innate immune signaling pathways in these two model hosts and determined which aspects of the innate immune response are conserved and whether they were derived by a process of divergent or convergent evolution. His laboratory currently uses the C. elegans pathogenesis model to study intestinal epithelial immunity and how hosts distinguish pathogens from beneficial commensal microorganisms. Related work in his laboratory concerns the identification and characterization of low molecular weight compounds that specifically activate C. elegans immune signaling pathways. His laboratory assembled an automated C. elegans sample preparation pipeline to enable high-throughput chemical screens using whole animals based on automated image analysis.

As of 2013, Ausubel had published 215 refereed scientific articles. In addition to serving on a variety of editorial boards, Ausubel is founding editor of Current Protocols in Molecular Biology. Ausubel was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1994, the American Academy of Microbiology in 2002 and also the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

Ausubel received the 2014, Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, for lifetime achievement in the field of genetics.