Scott Blanchard recieved his Ph.D. in the Program in Biophysics from Stanford University School of Medicine in 2002. He worked under the direction of Dr. Joseph Puglisi during his thesis work focusing on the structure and function of RNA. Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell in July of 2004, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University under the supervision of Dr. Steven Chu. During this period, he was able to make the first demonstrations that the ribosome and mechanism of translation were amenable to single-molecule interrogations.

Scott presently holds appointments in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, The Program in Chemical Biology, and the Department of Biochemistry at Weill-Cornell Medical College (WCMC) located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan within the Tri-Institutional Network that includes Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center, and Rockefeller University. Research in the laboratory focuses on examining structure-function relationships in macromolecular assemblies, including the ribosome, using a variety of genetic, biochemical, and spectroscopic approaches. A principal focus of these investigations is to discover how regulatory factors and small-molecule agents affect the function of molecular machines.