Christopher D. Lima, PhD is Chair of Structural Biology at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York. His PhD from Northwestern focused on the structure of DNA topoisomerase I. As a Helen Hay Whitney fellow at Columbia, he characterized a nucleotidyl transferase family. He is recognized for work on protein and RNA quality control pathways through reconstitution biochemistry and structural biology to illuminate function. He was a Beckman Young Investigator and Rita Allan Scholar and is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Sciences.