Israeli Scientist Wins Nobel Prize

Israeli and Hebrew University Alumni Ada Yonath has won the Nobel prize in chemistry.  Here is what the Hebrew U alumni association had to say about it:

AFHU is proud to share that Dr. Ada E. Yonath, co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earned her B.Sc (1962) in chemistry and M.Sc. (1964) in biochemistry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  She is the fourth woman ever to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Dr. Yonath shares this year’s honor with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory in Cambridge, U.K. and Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University.  The Nobel Prize was awarded for their studies on the structure of the ribosome, which exists in living cells and turns DNA into proteins. These proteins control the biochemistry of all living organisms.

Dr. Yonath, current director of the Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at theWeizmann Institute, was born in Jerusalem. She received her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute and conducted post-doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT.  Recently elected to the Israeli Academy for Science and Humanities, Dr. Yonath received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2007.

AFHU congratulates Dr. Yonath on her pioneering work in the field of ribosome crystallography. We congratulate The Hebrew University of Jerusalem for producing scientific leaders of global stature.