[Frontier Leaders] Combatting Antibiotic's Resistance?

Frontier Leaders Seminar

Title: Combatting Antibiotic's Resistance?

Speaker: Ada Yonath, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009

Affiliation: Weizmann Institute, Israel

Ada Yonath

Born in Jerusalem (Israel), Ada Yonath studied at the Hebrew University, earned her PhD degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and completed her post-doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). Currently she is a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute, holds the Kimmel Professorial Chair, and is the director of the Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly. From 1986 to 2004 she also headed the Max-Planck Research Unit in Hamburg, Germany.

In her research, Ada Yonath attempts to determine the structural bases for processes involved in protein biosynthesis and their inhibition by antibiotics or similar compounds, including elucidation of mechanisms used for acquiring resistance, and the properties utilized for the discrimination between pathogens and eukaryotes, namely those allowing for clinical usefulness.

She uses X-ray crystallography supported by molecular biology, mutagenesis, and other biophysical methods and focuses on ribosomes, which translate the genetic code into proteins. For this aim, she established in the 1970s the first laboratory for protein crystallography in Israel, which was the only laboratory of this kind in the country for almost a decade.

Ada Yonath is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the European Academy of Sciences and Art, the European Molecular Biology Organization, and the International Academy of Astronautics. Additionally, she has honorary doctorates from Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion, and Oxford Universities.

Her awards include the 1st European Crystallography Prize (2000); the Israel Prize, which is the most prestigious prize of the State of Israel (2002); the Harvey Prize (2002); the Cotton Medal of the American Chemical Society (2002); the Anfinsen Prize of the Protein Society, USA (2003); the Massry Award, USA (2004); The Paul Karrer Gold Medal, Zurich, Switzerland (2004); the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University, NYC (2005); the Israeli Prime minister EMET prize (2006); the Paul Ehrlich–Ludwig Medal, Germany (2007); the Wolf Prize (2007); the UNESCO Award for Women in Science Prize, representing Europe (2008); the Palade Gold Medal (2008); the Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2008); the Erice Prize for Peace, Rome, the Vatican (2009); the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Stockholm (2009).