Posts in category: Science

Sumio Iijima was born in Saitama Japan on 2 May,1939. He has been a ‘University’ professor at Meijo University (Nagoya) since 1999 and a Senior Research Fellow at NEC Corporation (Tokyo). He was Former Director of Nanotube Research Center of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan and current Honorary Fellow of AIST.

After graduating from Electro Communication University in Tokyo, he continued his graduate studies at Tohoku University (Sendai), where he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1968 with a focus on condensed matter physics and electron microscopy. His dissertation was on Print-Out Effects in AgBr Crystals. Later, in 1970, he moved to Arizona State University as a postdoctoral researcher, where he worked with Professor J. Cowley on the development of the high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and established the current HRTEM method ahead of the rest of the world. He reported pioneering work on atomic-resolution HRTEM for a variety of materials, including complex oxides, minerals, carbon materials, metal atoms. In the meantime, he was invited to Cambridge University in 1979 and worked on HRTEM imaging of amorphous carbon. After returning to Japan in 1982 and engaged in research on ‘Ultra-Fine Particles’ for five years as part of the Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology project (National research project), he joined NEC Research Laboratories in1987.

In 1991 he discovered carbon nanotubes, pioneering nanoscience and nanotechnology in the world. The first paper reporting carbon nanotubes currently has 58,000 Google citations and counting. The discovery honored him with numerous invitations to international conferences such as the 2014 KAUST-NSF Conference, as well as awards, prizes and honorary doctates, including the Franklin Medal in physics in 2001, the Agilent Europhysics award, the APS McGroddy prize, the Imperial Prize, the Japan Academy Prize, and Order of Culture Merits (2009). In 2007, he was awarded the Aminoff Prize (Sweden) and the Balzan Prize (Italy), European Inventor Award in 2015. He was elected as Member of the Japan Academy, the foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the foreign members of the National Academy of Science (USA) and also the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Howard Yuan-Hao Chang received his undergraduate A.B. degree at Harvard College 1994, Ph.D. in Biology from MIT 1998, and M.D. from Harvard Medical School 2000. He completed Dermatology residency and postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Since joining the Stanford faculty in 2004, he earned tenure in 2008 and ascended to the rank of Professor in the Depts. of Dermatology and Genetics. Currently, Prof. Chang is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and Director of the Center for Personal Dynamic Regulomes at Stanford University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Prof. Chang’s research has revealed the hidden information and logic of the noncoding genome, which comprise 98% of human DNA. RNA and DNA switches. He discovered a new class of genes, termed long noncoding RNAs, can control gene activity throughout the genome, illuminating a new layer of biological regulation. He invented ATAC-seq and multiple new methods for identifying DNA regulatory elements genome-wide and in single cells. These RNA and DNA switches decide when and where genes turn on and off, and have revealed mechanisms and targets in a plethora of human diseases, most notably in cancer, immunity, and development. His recent studies of extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) in cancer showed that ecDNAs are prevalent, arise early in cancer, and represent profound epigenetic dysregulation that leads to tumor heterogeneity, oncogene overexpression, and drug resistance. The long term goal of his research is to decipher the regulatory information in the genome to benefit human health.

Prof. Chang is a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Medicine (NAM), and American Academy for the Arts and Sciences. Prof. Chang’s honors include the NAS Award for Molecular Biology, Outstanding Investigator Award of the National Cancer Institute, Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, Judson Daland Prize of the American Philosophical Society, and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise. His work was honored by the journal Cell as a Landmark paper over the last 40 years and by Science as “Insight of the decade”.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Nader Masmoudi received his B.Sc. from the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand in 1994, where he came first at the Concours of Ecole Normale Supérieure and Ecole Polytechnique, and his M.Sc. from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1996. This performance earned him the prize of the Republic of Tunisia for academic achievement. He then later received his PhD from Paris-Dauphine University in 1999 with a paper on asymptotic problems in Fluid Mechanics and his second diploma (Habilitation) from the same university on Fluid Mechanics and Gas Dynamics in 2000. Masmoudi was appointed as a researcher at the CNRS in Paris from 1998 until 2000. 

Masmoudi then was appointed as an assistant professor at New York University in 2000 at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science, where he later became a full professor in 2008. Focusing primarily on partial differential equations coming from physics, functional analysis, differential geometry and fluid mechanics. Currently Professor Masmoudi is a distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the New York University of Abu Dhabi and head of his Research Center on Stability, Instability and Turbulence.

Professor Masmoudi’s research has been at the forefront of Partial Differential Equations, Fluid Mechanics and Dynamical Systems for the past 20 years. He has been cited by more than 8000 papers for his works in pure and applied mathematics, and has helped discover many breakthroughs in Fluid Mechanics and especially in 2D and 3D Euler equations, the Prandtl system, which have remained unsolved since 1757. In particular he discovered that Euler’s equations do not always apply and can sometimes “blow-up” and become singular under certain conditions. This work helps to solve many problems in fluid-modeling topics ranging from airplanes and weather predictions to traffic flow and crowd management.

An author of more than 160 papers, Professor Masmoudi is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as of 2021. He has been recognized with numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the Sloan research Fellowship, the Best Scientific Paper Award in Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré, a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, a Chair from the Fondation Sciences mathematiques de Paris, the Fermat Prize, the Chair Schlumberger from the IHES in Paris, the SIAG/APDE Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Kuwait Prize in the field of Fundamental Science from The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, and the Kifra Prize from the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He was also a recipient of a Gold medal at the mathematical Olympiad.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Martin Hairer pursued his studies at the University of Geneva, where he received undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Physics in 1998, as well as a Ph.D. in Physics in 2001. He subsequently held positions at the University of Warwick (UK) and the Courant Institute (US), before moving to Imperial College London, where he currently holds a chair in probability and stochastic analysis. His work is in the general area of probability theory with a main focus on the analysis of stochastic partial differential equations. In particular, he recently developed the theory of regularity structures which allows to give a precise mathematical meaning to a number of such equations that were previously outside the scope of mathematical analysis. 

Author of a monograph and over 100 research articles, Professor Hairer is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was also awarded an honorary degree from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2016. His work has been distinguished with a number of prizes and awards, most notably the LMS Whitehead and Philip Leverhulme prizes in 2008, the Fermat prize in 2013, the Fröhlich prize and Fields Medal in 2014, a knighthood in 2016, and the Breakthrough prize in Mathematics in 2020. 

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Stuart Parkin received his B.Sc. in Physics and Theoretical Physics in 1977, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics in 1980, from the University of Cambridge, U.K. He was elected to a Research Fellowship, Trinity College, Cambridge in 1979, and carried out postdoctoral work in the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Université Paris-Sud. He then moved to IBM Research, San Jose, California as an IBM World Trade Fellow in 1982. In 1999, Parkin was appointed an IBM Fellow, IBM’s highest technical honor. Parkin was the Director of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center from 2004 to 2014, when he took up a position as a Director at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany. He was also appointed as an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle. Parkin is an elected Fellow/ Member of several major scientific academies and has received 4 honorary doctorates. He has published more than 580 papers and has an h-index of 113. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes.

Parkin’s work focuses on the exploration and discovery of novel spintronic materials and devices for future memory and computing systems. He has led the field of spintronics for more than 30 years. Parkin invented and developed materials and devices for three major spintronic memory and storage technologies. All of these rely on the creation and manipulation of spin currents in atomically engineered thin film heterostructures. These include a spin-valve sensor that can detect tiny magnetic fields at room temperature, a high performance non-volatile magnetic random access memory that relies on magnetic spin-dependent tunneling junctions, and magnetic racetrack memory, a novel three-dimensional shift memory-storage device that relies on the current controlled manipulation of series of magnetic domain walls.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Xiaodong Wang received his B.Sc. in Biology from Beijing Normal University in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1991 from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center, where he completed his postdoctoral research in 1995. He later worked at Emory University for one year followed by an appointment at the University of Texas in 1996, where he proceeded to hold the George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science until 2010. In 1997, he was also appointed as an Assistant Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical institute. He has been the Director of the National Institute of Biological Sciences at Beijing since 2010.

Professor Wang is a member of several editorial boards and professional societies and has published over 50 articles in well-established scientific journals. He is also the recipient of several awards and honors.

Wang’s work focuses on specific loss of cell vitality during animal development and adult life, which is an important part of normal animal physiology. Defects in such a process are the cause of many human diseases. These forms of cell death are executed by specific biochemical programs within the dying cell, thus termed regulated cell death. Wang’s laboratory has been primarily responsible for illustrating the biochemical pathways of two such forms regulatory of cell death in mammals, i.e. apoptosis and necrosis. Most remarkably, Wang’s laboratory discovered the role of mitochondria, the classical viewed powerhouse and metabolic center of eukaryotic cells, in apoptosis in mammalian cells. Specifically, his laboratory discovered that cytochrome c, a component of mitochondrial electron transfer chain, is able to trigger the activation of apoptotic caspases once released from the mitochondria. Apoptotic caspases are intracellular proteases that are normally kept in inactive forms in living cells. Once activated, these proteases execute apoptosis, a morphologically distinctive form of cell death. Professor Wang’s group also identified the cytosolic cytochrome c receptor Apaf1, and a member of the caspase protein family, caspase-9, as the initiator caspase that is directly activated by the Apaf-1/cytochrome c protein complex termed apoptosome. In addition to cytochrome c, Wang’s group also discovered Smac, another mitochondrial intermembrane protein that neutralizes caspase inhibition imposed by the inhibitor of apoptotic proteins, IAPs.

Based on Smac’s molecular mechanism functioning, Professor Wang and his collaborators designed a small molecule mimetic of Smac protein that is cell permeable and directly sensitizes treated cells for apoptosis. The Smac mimetic led them to the finding that in some cell types, a caspase-independent form of programmed cell death occurs in the presence of Smac mimetic in response to tumor necrosis factor family of cytokines or toll-like receptor ligands. Their laboratory subsequently identified the receptor interacting kinase 3, RIP3, and its substrate, a pseudokinase MLKL, as the core biochemical components of this form of necrotic cell death, also called necroptosis. Necroptosis is now recognized to have potential roles in many degenerative diseases and normal aging in male reproductive system.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Allen Bard received his B.Sc. in Chemistry from New York City College in 1955, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1956 and 1958, respectively. He joined the University of Texas as an instructor in 1958 and rose through the academic ranks to the Professorship of Chemistry in 1967. He held many endowed positions including the Sherman Mills Fairchild Scholar at California Institute of Technology and Woodward Visiting Professor at Harvard University. He has been the Hackerman-Welch Regents Chair in Chemistry, since 1985, and the Director of the Center for Electrochemistry at the University of Texas, since 2006.

While Professor Bard’s research has been focused on the field of electrochemistry, it has also broadly impacted all subdisciplines of chemistry as evident by his co-discovery of electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL) in 1965, and its subsequent impact and development. He discovered that emissive excited states could be generated at electrode surfaces through highly energetic electron-transfer reactions. Professor Bard invented the scanning electrochemical microscope (SECM) in 1987, which has been used for very high-resolution electrochemical analysis and fabrication of surface reactions. His recent work has been focused on single-molecule electrochemistry, the application of electrochemical methods for display technologies, the study of individual catalyst particles and molecular electronics.

Professor Bard has published over 900 papers and 8 books, and holds more than 20 patents. He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including Journal of the American Chemical Society, Electrochimica Acta, New Journal of Chemistry, and NANO. He held leadership positions in several professional organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Bard has received numerous honors and awards including National Medal of Science, Olin-Palladium Medal and Priestley Medal.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.

Jean Frechet obtained his BSc. in Chemical Engineering from Institut de Chimie et Physique Industrielles, Lyon, France in 1967, followed by an MS and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Syracuse University, USA in 1969 and 1971, respectively. Then he joined the University of Ottawa in Canada from 1973 to 1987; he was also appointed as a Visiting Scientist at IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose, CA, USA, from 1979 to 1983. He joined Cornell University as IBM Professor of Chemistry from 1987 to 1997, and was appointed as Peter J. Debye Chair of Chemistry from 1993 to 1997. Professor Frechet joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1996 and held several academic positions including a Scientific Director of the Molecular Foundry of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and in 2011, he was named Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the same university. He was also appointed as a Senior Vice President of Research, Innovation & Economic Development at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia from 2010 to 2019. 

Professor Frechet co-developed the concept of chemically amplified photoresists with Grant Willson, thereby opening a new era in the fabrication and miniaturization of microelectronic devices, which have been the basis of nearly all the world’s microelectronic devices that have been made in the last two decades. His work on dendrimers has been used to explore a host of applications including the delivery of therapeutic materials. Similarly, the work done on macroporous polymers led to their quick commercialization for use in chemical and biological separations. Professor Frechet later developed innovative polymeric carriers for both drugs and vaccines as well as explored the fundamental design of electroactive polymers used today for organic field-effect transistors and solar cells.

Professor Frechet has published over 880 papers and holds over 100 patents. He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals and scientific Committees, and has also received numerous honors and awards including the Dickson Prize of science, Herman Mark Award, Nagoya Gold Medal, Grand Prix de la Maison de la Chimie and Japan Prize.

This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.