George Feher wins Wolf Prize in Chemistry

January 9, 2007 on 11:09 pm | In Faculty News |

George Feher, UCSD Physics Department, who uncovered the basic mechanisms for how plants and bacteria use photosynthesis to convert light into chemical energy, has been awarded the prestigious 2007 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. He will share the $100,000 prize with Ada Yonath of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science ‘for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis.’ Dr. Feher is one of the founding faculty members of UCSD and has been here since 1960.

The previous UCSD winner of the Wolf Prize was Roger Y. Tsien (Chemistry & Biochemistry and Pharmacology Depts) who was awarded the 2004 Wolf Prize in Medicine.