MOLECULAR FRONTIERS - Key Persons
Ada Yonath 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry | Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel Ada Yonath is best known for her pioneering work on the structure of the ribosome. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2009, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome. Photo by Hareesh N. Nampoothiri, under under CC BY SA 3.0 license
Ahmed Zewail was an Egyptian scientist, known as the "father of femtochemistry". He won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian scientist who won Nobel Prize in a scientific field. He was the Linus Pauling Chair Professor Chemistry, Professor of Physics and the director of the Physical Biology Centre for the Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital
Arieh Warshel is an Israeli-American Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Bai Chunli is a Chinese scientist. He graduated from Peking University in 1978. In 1981 he received a master's degree of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 1985 earned a doctor's degree. From 1985 to 1987, he was at the California Institute of Technology, engaged in postdoctoral research.He is a professor, a Ph.D. degree, an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the The World Academy of Sciences. Currently he is President of The World Academy of Sciences, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the cochairman of China Association for Science and Technology and the president of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
He mainly engages in the field of important nanotechnology scanning tunneling microscopy study, his work focuses on the scanning probe microscopy techniques, and molecular nano-structure, and nanotechnology research. He has published a large number of books in both Chinese and English. He was the alternate committee member of the 15th and the 16th CPC central committee, and the sixth vice president of the China Association for Science and Technology. In 2011, he became an honorary member of Chinese Association for Science and Technology.
He is now a part-time professor of Peking University, Tsinghua University, University of Science and Technology of China, Nankai University, and China University of Geosciences, and is also a visiting professor at Liaoning Normal University andNanjing Audit University.
Ben Feringa 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry | University of Groningen, Netherlands Ben Feringa is the Jacobus van 't Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry, University of Groningen, Netherlands, and an Academy Professor and Chair of Board of the Science Division of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Jean-Pierre Sauvage, "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines". The early introduction of chiroptical molecular switches, based on the design of the first chiral overcrowded alkenes and the demonstration of optically controlled molecular switching and amplification of chirality in mesoscopic systems, lead to molecular rotary motors in which chirality plays a critical role in achieving the same function achieved by nature, for example, the unidirectional rotation of retinal in rhodopsin. This work led to the discovery of the world's first unidirectional molecular rotary motor and this work has been laying the ground-work for a key component of future molecular nanotechnology i.e. nanomachines and nanorobots powered by molecular motors. Feringa's design and synthesis of nanomolecular machines, specifically molecular switches and molecular motors, have initiated major novel approaches towards complex and dynamic chemical systems and the dynamic control of function. Wybe, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Job Titles:
- Founder
- Founding Patron of Molecular Frontiers Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Bengt Nordén is founder of Molecular Frontiers,and holds the position as Chairman.
When appointed professor of Physical Chemistry of Chalmers Bengt Nordén was for many years among the youngest Chair Professors in Sweden and had ample opportunities to build up an institution engaging young people that shared his broad interests, ranging from spectroscopy, photophysics and quantum chemistry, to molecular biology, biotechnology and medicine. He is harvesting the fruits of this interdisciplinary onset in various forms: serendipitous breakthroughs and a unique physical-chemical school at Chalmers with a world-renowned spectroscopic profile, to mention two. Being a generalist by virtue of both curiosity and training has been helpful when he has been in charge of major awarding systems, including the Nobel Prize. As a tracker of ground-breaking achievements he also in this role received continuous inspiration to new research directions.
Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) Légion d'honneur | Yale University, United States Benoit Mandelbrot is widely regarded as one of the most impactful mathematicians of all time, recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature. He was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovery of the Mandelbrot set in 1980. He showed how visual complexity can be created from simple rules, and he claimed that things typically considered to be "rough", a "mess", or "chaotic", such as clouds or shorelines, actually had a "degree of order". His math and geometry-centered research included contributions to such fields as statistical physics, meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, anatomy, taxonomy, neurology, linguistics, information technology, computer graphics, economics, geology, medicine, physical cosmology, engineering, chaos theory, econophysics, metallurgy, and the social sciences. Mandelbrot's awards include the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1993, the Lewis Fry Richardson Prize of the European Geophysical Society in 2000, the Japan Prize in 2003, and the Einstein Lectureship of the American Mathematical Society in 2006. Photo by Rama - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr
Carlos Bustamante University of California, Berkeley, United States Carlos Bustamante uses novel methods of single-molecule visualization, such as scanning force microscopy, to study the structure and function of nucleoprotein assemblies. His laboratory is developing methods of single-molecule manipulation, such as optical and magnetic tweezers, to characterize the elasticity of DNA, to induce the mechanical unfolding of individual protein and RNA molecules, and to investigate the machine-like behavior of molecular motors. Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley, College of Chemistry
Chintamani Nagesa Ramachandra Rao FRS, also known as C.N.R. Rao, is an Indian chemist who has worked mainly in solid-state and structural chemistry. He currently serves as the Head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. Rao has honorary doctorates from 60 universities from around the world. He has authored around 1,500 research papers and 45 scientific books. He is the recipient of most of the major scientific awards, and is member of all major scientific organisations.
On 16 November 2013, the Government of India announced his selection for Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India, making him the third scientist after C.V. Raman and A. P. J. Abdul Kalam to receive the award. He, along with the legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, was conferred the award on 4 February 2014 by President Pranab Mukherjee in a special ceremony in the Durbar Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
David Julius is an American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on molecular mechanisms of pain sensation and heat, including the characterization of the TRPV1 and TRPM8 receptors that detect capsaicin, menthol, and temperature.
In 2021, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.
Elizabeth Blackburn, is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is the former President of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Previously she was a biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studied the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. In 1984, Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere, with Carol W. Greider. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Greider and Jack W. Szostak.
Blackburn's research involves further investigation of the genetic composition and cellular functions of telomeres and telomerase, as well as studies on the interactions of these cellular components and their roles in cancer and aging. She is well-known for her book "The telomere effect", which deals with how the state of a person's telomeres is influenced by lifestyle.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Blackburn has received nearly every major award in science, including the Lasker, Gruber and Gairdner prizes. In 2007, Blackburn was listed among Time Magazine's The TIME 100 - The People Who Shape Our World. She is a member of numerous prestigious scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the Royal Society of London.
Erling Norrby has an M.D. and Ph.D. from the Karolinska Institute, the School of Medicine, Stockholm. He was Professor of Virology at KI between 1972 and 1997, and Professor of Virology and chairman at the J Craig Venter Institute for 25 years. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, serving as its Permanent Secretary between 1997 and 2003. He was member of the Nobel Committee at KI between 1975 and 1980.
Professor Norrby has published the books "Nobel Prizes and Life Sciences" (2010), "Nobel Prizes and Nature's Surprises" (2013) and "Nobel Prizes and Notable Discoveries (2016). He has been awarded the Johan von Höpken Medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2003, Carl XVI Gustaf's Medal of the 12th Size with the Band of the Seraphim Order in 2005 and Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from the Emperor of Japan in 2006.
Frances Arnold is an internationally recognized American scientist and engineer. She pioneered methods of directed evolution to create useful biological systems, including enzymes, metabolic pathways, genetic regulatory circuits, and organisms. She is the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, where she studies evolution and its applications in science, medicine, chemicals and energy. She earned her B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1979 and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. There, she did her postdoctoral work in biophysical chemistry before coming to Caltech in 1986.
In 2018, she became the fift woman ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Her work has also been recognized by many other awards, including the 2011 Draper Prize and a 2011 National Medal of Technology and Innovation. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Arnold has the rare honor of being elected to all three National Academies in the United States - The National Academy of Sciences, The National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. Arnold is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
A member of the Advisory Board of the DOE-funded Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering, Arnold also serves on the President's Advisory Council of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). She is currently serving as a judge for The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, 2013.
Arnold's Caltech research is in green chemistry and alternative energy, including the development of highly active enzymes (cellulolytic and biosynthetic enzymes) and microorganisms to convert renewable biomass to fuels and chemicals. She is co-inventor on numerous patents and co-founded Gevo, Inc. in 2005.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University
George M. Whitesides is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He is best known for his work in the areas of NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography, microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology. Whitesides is also known for publishing his "outline system" for writing scientific papers. As of December 2011, he has the highest Hirsch index rating of all living chemists.
Harry B Gray is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. As a pioneer of the important and thriving field of bioinorganic chemistry, he has made many key contributions, the most important of which is the development of fundamental understanding of electron transfer in biological systems, at the atomic level.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School
Jack Szostak is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres.
Szostak is credited with the construction of the world's first yeast artificial chromosome. That achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His achievements in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project.
His discoveries have helped to clarify the events that lead to chromosomal recombination-the reshuffling of genes that occurs during meiosis-and the function of telomeres, the specialized DNA sequences at the tips of chromosomes.
In the early 90s his laboratory shifted its research direction and focused on studying RNA enzymes, which had been recently discovered by Cech and Altman. He developed the technique of in vitro evolution of RNA (also developed independently by Gerald Joyce) which enables the discovery of RNAs with desired functions through successive cycles of selection, amplification and mutation. He isolated the first aptamer (term he used for the first time). He isolated RNA enzymes with RNA ligase activity directly from random sequence (project of David Bartel).
Jean-Marie Lehn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Donald Cram and Charles Pedersen in 1987 for his synthesis of cryptands. Lehn was an early innovator in the field of supramolecular chemistry, i.e. the chemistry of host-guest molecular assemblies created by intermolecular interactions, and continues to innovate in this field. His group has published in excess of 900 peer-reviewed articles in chemistry literature.
Jennifer Doudna 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry | UC Berkeley & Howard Hughes Med. Inst., United States UC Berkeley and Howard Hughes Medical InstituteJennifer Doudna is professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Doudna has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 1997, and since 2018 holds the position of senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes as well as that of professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Doudna has been a leading figure in what is referred to as the "CRISPR revolution" for her fundamental work and leadership in developing CRISPR-mediated genome editing. In 2012, Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were the first to propose that CRISPR/Cas9 (enzymes from bacteria that control microbial immunity) could be used for programmable editing of genomes, which is now considered one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology. [Video] CRISPR Systems: From adaptive immunity to genome editing Presentation at the Molecular Frontiers Symposium in Stockholm 2017 Photo by Christopher Michael, under CC BY SA 4.0 license
John Craig Venter is an American biologist and entrepreneur. He is known for being one of the first to sequence the human genome and for creating the first cell with a synthetic genome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), and is now working at JCVI to create synthetic biological organisms. He is a co-founder of Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) and Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI). SGI is a privately held company developing products and solutions including sustainable bio-fuels, vaccines, biotherapeutics and transplantable organs. HLI is a genomic-based, health intelligence company empowering proactive healthcare.
Dr Venter was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010".
Barry Sharpless is an American chemist known for his work on stereoselective reactions. He was awarded a half-share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 for his work on stereoselective oxidation reactions (Sharpless epoxidation, Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation, Sharpless oxyamination). The other half of the year's Prize was shared between William S. Knowles and Ryōji Noyori (for their work on stereoselective hydrogenation). He also successfully epoxidized (using racemic tartaric acid) a C-86 Buckminster Fullerene ball, employing p-Cresol as solvent.
In 2022, he was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for coining the concept of click chemistry for a functional form of chemistry, where molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently, and discovering what has become the crown jewel of click chemistry: the copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition. Click chemistry involves a set of highly selective, exothermic reactions which occur under mild conditions.
Job Titles:
- Chairman, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Director of the Swedish Scientific Council for Sustainable Development
Karin Markides is Director of the Swedish Scientific Council for Sustainable Development. She was President and CEO of Chalmers University of Technology between 2006 and 2015. She has previously taught and conducted research at Stockholm University, Brigham Young University and Uppsala University. As part of her broad international experience, she held a guest professorship at Stanford University in the US. She tutored more than 30 PhD students and published over 250 scientific articles. As of 1999 and 1992 respectively, she is a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Between, April 2004 and August 2006, Karin Markides held the position of Deputy Director General at Vinnova, a state agency that finances research and innovation for sustainable development. She also has been board member of several high tech start-up companies in the US and the Swedish Research Council Committee for Research Infrastructure as well as acted as a board member of the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. During 2007 to 2009 Karin Markides was a member of the High Level Group on the Competitiveness of the European Chemical Industry. She was the only representative from the academia.
Since 2009 Karin Markides holds the chair of CESAER - The Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research - a non-profit-making international association of the leading European Universities of Technology, Engineering Colleges and Schools, cooperating on policy issues.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University
Michael Levitt is a biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. His research is in computational biology and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Molecular Frontiers Scientific Advisory Board member Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems"
Omar Yaghi is the pinoeer in reticular chemistry, a new field of chemistry concerned with stitching molecular building blocks together by strong bonds to make open frameworks. His most recognizable work is in the design and production of new classes of compounds known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs), and covalent organic frameworks (COFs). MOFs are noted for their extremely high surface areas (5640 m2/g for MOF-177) and very low crystalline densities (0.17 g·cm−3 for COF-108). Yaghi also pioneered molecular weaving, and synthesized the world's first material woven at the atomic and molecular levels (COF-505).
He has been leading the effort in applying these materials in clean energy technologies including hydrogen and methane storage, carbon dioxide capture and storage, as well as harvesting water from desert air.
Job Titles:
- Professor at the Department of Biology
Piero Baglioni is an Italian chemist and University professor at the University of Florence. Baglioni produced several innovations in the field of both inorganic and organic colloids. Baglioni is the author of more than 250 publications on books and largely diffused international journals. He is also the author of 16 patents for the preparation of aqueous suspensions at high concentration of particulate, for the therapy and photodynamic diagnosis of tumors, for the conservation of the cultural heritage, for the setup of a new process for the treatment of textile industrial waste, for production of emulsions from bio crude oil, for production of nanoparticles and novel nano-coatings via flame-spraying, and using homogeneous and heterogeneous solutions.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Professor at the University of Alabama
- Head of Physical Materials Chemistry at Stockholm University
Prof. Anja-Verena Mudring is Head of Physical Materials Chemistry at Stockholm University, Sweden, since summer 2016. She studied chemistry at the Friedrich Wilhelms Universität in Bonn, Germany, and carried out her doctoral thesis work at the Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. 2001-2003 she worked as a Feodor-Lynen fellow at the Ames Laboratory, a US Department of Energy National Laboratory. In spring 2003 she started her independent scientific career as a Liebig fellow at the Universität zu Köln. After having completed her habilitation in 2006, she moved to the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, where she headed the Materials Synthesis and Characterization group and became Chair of Inorganic Chemistry III. At RUB she also led the interdisciplinary Research Department Interfacial Systems Chemistry. During that time she established a EU-Marie Curie Training network on luminescent materials (LUMINET) and founded a COST action on ionic liquids (EXIL). In 2013 she accepted the offer as the Glenn Murphy Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Iowa State University and was the strategic hire for the Critical Materials Institute, a US DOE Energy Innovation Hub, led by the Ames Laboratory.
Prof. Mudring is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alabama, USA. Prof. Mudring has organized a number of national and international conferences, most recently the 2016 Gordon Conference on Ionic Liquids and the 2017 Rare Earth Research Conference (RERC). She has received numerous awards and fellowships such as the H.C. Starck award in solid state science from the GDCh, was a Feodor Lynen Fellow and held a Humboldt fellowship from the Polish Science Foundation (FNP). She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2008. Her research has been sponsored by the ERC through two grants, the European Commission, the DFG (German Science Foundation), DOE (US Department of Energy) and NSF (US National Science Foundation) as well as industry. She is currently receiving support from the Vetenskapsraadet (VR, Swedish Research Council) and the Carl Tryggers Stiftelse. She most recently has received the Göran Gustafsson prize in Chemistry 2017 given out by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. Since 2008 she is serving as an Associate Editor of the ACS journal "Crystal Growth & Design". She has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications (h-index: 39, >4100 citations).
Job Titles:
- Professor at the Department of Life Sciences
Reiko Kuroda is a Japanese chemist who is a professor at the Department of Life Sciences at University of Tokyo. Her field of research is primarily chirality within both inorganic chemistry and organic chemistry. In 2006, Dr Kuroda was appointed to serve as a governor for the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. On June 10, 2009, Dr Kuroda was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in its class for chemistry.
Richard N. Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science at Stanford University. He was born on November 19, 1939 in Cleveland, Ohio, and is a graduate of Harvard University, where he received his B.A. degree in chemistry and physics in 1961 and his Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1964. In 1965 he became an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but moved to the University of Colorado in 1966, remaining there until 1969 while holding joint appointments in the departments of chemistry, and physics and astrophysics. In 1969 he was appointed to a full professorship in the chemistry department at Columbia University, becoming the Higgins Professor of Natural Science in 1975. In 1977 he moved to Stanford University. He was named Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University in 2005. In 2006 he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professor.
Professor Zare is renowned for his research in the area of laser chemistry, resulting in a greater understanding of chemical reactions at the molecular level. By experimental and theoretical studies he has made seminal contributions to our knowledge of molecular collision processes and contributed very significantly to solving a variety of problems in chemical analysis. His development of laser induced fluorescence as a method for studying reaction dynamics has been widely adopted in other laboratories.
Richard Schrock 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States In 2005, Richard Schrock received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Robert H. Grubbs and Yves Chauvin, for his work in the area of olefin metathesis, an organic synthesis technique. Schrock was the first to elucidate the structure and mechanism of so-called 'black box' olefin metathesis catalysts. Initial work at DuPont involved the synthesis of tantalum alkylidenes, alkylidenes being a crucial resting state in the catalytic cycle of olefin metathesis. His work at MIT has led to a detailed understanding of a group of molybdenum alkylidenes and alkylidynes which are active olefin and alkyne methathesis catalysts, respectively. Schrock has done much work to demonstrate that metallacyclobutanes are the key intermediate in olefin metathesis, with metallacyclobutadienes being the key intermediate in alkyne methathesis.
Roald Hoffmann has investigated both organic and inorganic substances, developing computational tools and methods such as the extended Hückel method, which he proposed in 1963. He also developed, with Robert Burns Woodward, rules for elucidating reaction mechanisms (the Woodward-Hoffmann rules). He also introduced the isolobal principle.
In 1981, Hoffmann received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with Kenichi Fukui "for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions"
Robert Langer is an American engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, inventor and the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was formerly the Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and maintains activity in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. He is also a faculty member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. He is a widely recognized and cited researcher in biotechnology, especially in the fields of drug delivery systems and tissue engineering. According to Web of Science he has been cited nearly 100,000 times and has an h-index of 155 as of Jan 23, 2014. Langer's research laboratory at MIT is the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world, maintaining about $10 million in annual grants and over 100 researchers.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Molecular Neurobiology
Roderick MacKinnon is a professor of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics at Rockefeller University who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Peter Agre in 2003 for his work on the structure and operation ofion channels.
Roger Y. Tsien (1952-2016) 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry | Univ. of California, San Diego, United States Roger Tsien was a Chinese American biochemist. He was a professor at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry "for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) with two other chemists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Osamu Shimomura of Boston University and Marine Biological Laboratory.
Ryoji Noyori 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry | Nagoya University, Japan Ryōji Noyori is a Japanese chemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001, sharing half of the prize with William S. Knowles for the study of chirally catalyzed hydrogenations; the second half of the Prize went to K. Barry Sharpless for his study in chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions (Sharpless epoxidation). Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive
Job Titles:
- Professor of Physical Chemistry at Lund University
Sara Snogerup Linse is professor of physical chemistry at Lund University in Sweden. Her research the biophysical chemistry of proteins, including binding, interaction and structure. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2004, and a member of the Nobel committee for Chemistry since 2012.
Sir Aaron Klug was a British chemist and biophysicist, and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Sir Harold (Harry) Walter Kroto was the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at the Florida State University, which he joined in 2004. Prior to that, he spent a large part of his career at the University of Sussex, where he held an emeritus professorship.
He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, for their discovery of fullerenes.
Sir John Meurig Thomas, FRS, Hon FREng, Hon FRSE, was the 1920 Professor and Head of the Dept of Physical Chemistry at University of Cambridge for 9 years from 1978.
He then became Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain and of the Davy Faraday Research Laboratories London, before returning to Cambridge as Master of Peterhouse (1993-2002) during which he carried out much of his research with Prof BFG Johnson. He pursued research in solid-state chemistry and was genuinely interested in popularising science (He was knighted in 1991).
He had numereous awards and prizes including gold medals from the Royal Soc, ACS (Willard Gibbs), Italian Chem Soc (Natta) Stanford Univ (Linus Pauling), the Zewail gold medal for molecular research (2015) and the Blaise Pascal medal of the European Academy of Sciences (2014) for the chemistry of materials. A new mineral, meurigite, was named in his honour in 1995.
Susan Lindquist was a professor of biology at MIT specializing in molecular biology, particularly the protein folding problem within a family of molecules known as heat-shock proteins, and prions. Lindquist was a member and former Director of the Whitehead Institute and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010.
Torsten Nils Wiesel is a Swedish neurophysiologist. Together with David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres.