Honorary Academician
Health Sciences: Doctor of Medicine and Chemistry
Date of admission: March 7, 2017
Admission speech: «The Roles of the Ubiquitin System in Health and Disease»
Reply speech: Hon. Dr. José Daniel Barquero Cabrero, Doctor in Social and Human Sciences; Legal and Economic Sciences; and Business Management and Administration
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004: He received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the functions of ubiquitins, a system used by the body’s cells to eliminate waste through the recycling of their proteins.
Prof. AVRAM HERSHKO
- Born in Karcag, Hungary, 1937. Emigrated to Israel in 1950.
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004 (with Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose).
UNIVERSITY DEGREES
- M.D. (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Hadassah Medical School.
- Served as a physician in the Israel Defense Forces (1965–1967).
- Postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (1969–1972), in the laboratory of Gordon Tomkins.
ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY
- Professor of Biochemistry at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
- Appointed Professor (1980) and Distinguished Professor (2000) at Technion.
- Founder and Head of the Department of Biochemistry at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, Haifa.
- Co-discoverer of the protein degradation system mediated by ubiquitin, which tags proteins for destruction in the proteasome.
- His research explained how cells control division, DNA repair and immune responses through selective protein degradation.
- Established the molecular basis of diseases such as specific cancers and cystic fibrosis, paving the way for new treatments.
- Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2000).
- Foreign Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2003).
AWARDS AND HONOURS
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2004).
- Israel Prize in Biochemistry (1994).
- Gairdner International Award (1999).
- Albert & Mary Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research (2000).
- Wolf Prize in Medicine (2001).
- Louisa Gross Horwitz Award (2001).
