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Profile: Aaron Ciechanover
His current work focuses on the degradation of nuclear oncoproteins.
Aaron Ciechanover was born in 1947 in Haifa, Israel. He is currently a professor at the Unit of Biochemistry and Director of the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in Medical Sciences at the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, in Haifa. He also serves on the scientific advisory board for the Israeli pharmaceutical research company BioLineRx.
Ciechanover studied medicine at the Hebrew University Medical School in Jerusalem, receiving his MD in 1974 before doing compulsory military service in Israel. He went on to earn his PhD from the Technion in 1981.
He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1980s when he first identified the process by which proteins to be broken down at any given moment are given a molecular label, called a ubiquitin, or a kiss of death - the discovery which earned him the Nobel Chemistry Prize along with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose.
He was an associate professor at the Technion from 1987 to 1992, and became a full professor in 1992.
He has received a number of scientific prizes in recent years, including the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research from the United States in 2000, the Henry Taube Prize from the Technion in 1997, and the Wachter Prize from Austria in 1999 which he shared with Avram Hershko.
He has since 1996 been a member of the Council of the European Molecular Biology Organization.
His current work focuses on the degradation of nuclear oncoproteins.
