Liz Nolan was raised in Niskayuna, New York and graduated magna cum laude from Smith College with highest honors in chemistry and a minor in music. Liz conducted her graduate studies in inorganic chemistry at MIT where she joined the laboratory of Professor Stephen J. Lippard and she pursued post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School. Liz joined the Department of Chemistry at MIT as an Assistant Professor in 2009 and was promoted to Associate Professor Without Tenure in 2014, Associate Professor with Tenure in 2016, and Professor with Tenure in 2019. She was selected as the Ivan R. Cottrell Professor of Immunology in 2020. Liz received a 2010 NIH New Innovator Award, a 2014 NSF CAREER Award, and was named a Searle Scholar in 2011, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow in 2013, and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2016 Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry and a 2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). For her contributions as an educator, Liz was awarded the 2016 MIT School of Science Teaching Prize for Graduate Education. In 2020, Liz began serving as the Associate Department Head overseeing the Department of Chemistry’s educational mission.