| 1 | Name: | Dr. Aaron J. Ciechanover | |
| Institution: | Technion - Israel Institute of Technology | ||
| Year Elected: | 2005 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 202. Cellular and Developmental Biology | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1947 | ||
Aaron Ciechanover was born in Haifa, Israel in 1947. He is currently on the academic staff of the Faculty of Medicine of the Technion in Haifa, Israel. He received his M.Sc. (1971) and M.D. (1975) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and his D.Sc. (1982) from the Technion. There, as a graduate student with Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin A. Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, they discovered that covalent attachment of ubiquitin to the target substrate signals it for degradation. They deciphered the mechanism of conjugation in a cell-free system, described the general proteolytic function of the system in cells, and proposed a model according to which this modification serves as a recognition signal for a specific downstream protease. As a post doctoral fellow with Dr. Harvey Lodish at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he collaborated with Drs. Alexander Varshavsky and Daniel Finley, and described the first mutant cell of the system, further corroborating the role of ubiquitin modification as a proteolytic signal in intact cells. Among the many prizes that Dr. Ciechanover received are the 2000 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Dr. Ciechanover is a member of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican. | |||