October 15, 2015, Chapel Hill, NC. The Nobel Prize in prize in chemistry was awarded to Dr. Aziz Sancar, a scientist at North Carolina University in Chapel Hill. for his contribution to the “mechanistic studies of DNA repair”. Dr. Sancar shared the prize with Tomas Lindahl of the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in Great Britain, and Paul Modrich of Duke University School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Dr. Aziz Sancar, Sancar who is currently the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the UNC School of Medicine, is a Turkish-born and USA citizen. He was born as a son of illiterate parents in 1946 in Savur, Mardin. He graduated from Istanbul University medical school, and is one of the three Turkish people accepted to the American National Academy of Sciences.
Through the years, Sancar earned the award for his work on mapping the cellular mechanisms that underlie DNA repair, mapped nucleotide excision repair which is vital to UV damage to DNA.
Last year’s chemistry prize went to Stefan Hell (Germany) and Americans Eric Betzig (USA) and William Moerner (USA) for finding ways to make microscopes more powerful than previously thought possible.
The Nobel Prize will be awarded on December 10th, 2015 in Sweden.
