Harvard is having trouble keep its Nobel Prize winners. UChicago keeps poaching them.
This year its biochemist Jack Szostak. Last year it was Michael Kremer in economics.
The Chemistry Dept. this year gains Szostak from Harvard and Paul Alivisatos from Berkeley (who also happens to the new Prez, of course).
It’s the latest in a long line of senior faculty stolen from Harvard in recent years.
Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jack Szostak will join the faculty of the University of Chicago as University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the College, effective Sept. 1, 2022.
A pioneering scholar of genetics who examines the biochemical origins of life, Szostak shared the [Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009. Szostak currently serves as Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, Professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, the Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital and as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
“Jack’s research has made a profound impact on fields including biology, human health, chemistry and physics, and he has dedicated his career to investigating the most difficult questions,” said Provost Ka Yee C. Lee, the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry. “We are delighted to welcome him to the University of Chicago as a member of our academic community.”
University Professors are among those recruited at a senior level from outside the University and are selected for internationally recognized eminence in their fields as well as for their potential for high impact across the University. Szostak will become the 24th person to hold a University Professorship, and the 11th active faculty member holding that title.
“The University of Chicago is known worldwide for its history of discovery in the sciences, and I can’t think of a better place to host the exploration of fundamental questions like the origins of life,” Szostak said. “I’ve been thrilled with the depth and breadth of the conversations I’ve already had with my future colleagues, and I can’t wait to join them in Chicago.”
‘‘I can’t think of a better place to host the exploration of fundamental questions like the origins of life.”
In 2009, Szostak shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres—the “end-cap” on a strand of DNA that protects the genetic information—and the enzyme telomerase.
In 1989, Victoria Lundblad and Szostak published a foundational paper showing that shortened telomeres caused a cell to age prematurely. This line of research has expanded into a major field, as scientists believe telomeres play key roles in aging, cell replication and cancer, among other areas.
Szostak’s work with yeast also yielded information on the biochemistry of DNA recombination—how DNA breaks, exchanges genetic information and repairs itself.
After his breakthroughs in the 1980s, Szostak switched fields and began to study RNA enzymes known as ribozymes.