Prof. Thomas Steitz HHMI, Yale University, USA

Thomas A. Steitz was a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Yale University. He received his PhD at Harvard University and pursued postdoctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England after which he joined the... read moreYale faculty in 1970. He pursued obtaining the structural basis for the mechanisms of all of the proteins and nucleic acids involved in replication of DNA, its transcription into RNA and translation into proteins. A major interest has been structural studies of the ribosome. In 2009, along with Venki Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". Prof. Thomas A. Steinz sadly passed away in October 2018.