Born: 22 June 1939, Israel
Died: NA
Country most active: Israel
Also known as: NA
Ada E Yonath is a biochemist and structural chemist, who earned her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in X-ray crystallographic studies on the structure of collagen. Yonath and her team led groundbreaking work mapping of the structure of ribosomes, using X-ray and crystallography, earning them the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yonath became the first Israeli woman to ever win a Nobel Prize, the first woman in the Middle East to win the prize in the sciences, and the first woman in nearly half a century to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
In 1970, she established what was the only protein crystallography laboratory in Israel for almost 10 years. From 1979 to 1984 she was a group leader with Heinz-Günter Wittmann at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. She was visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1977–78. She led a Max-Planck Institute Research Unit at DESY in Hamburg, Germany (1986–2004) along with her research activities at the Weizmann Institute.