Sancar, Aziz

Sancar, Aziz,

1946–, Turkish-American biochemist and molecular biologist, M.D. Istanbul Univ., 1969, Ph.D. Univ. of Texas at Dallas, 1977. From 1977to 1982, Sancar was a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine. In 1982, he joined the faculty at the Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he is now Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. In 2015 Sancar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul ModrichModrich, Paul Lawrence,
1946–, American biochemist and molecular geneticist, b. Raton, N.M., Ph.D. Stanford Univ., 1973. Modrich joined the faculty at the Duke Univ. School of Medicine in 1976, and he has been a Howard Hughes Investigator since 1994.
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 and Tomas LindahlLindahl, Tomas,
1938–, Swedish-born British biochemist, grad. Karolinska Institute (Ph.D. 1967, M.D. 1970). Lindahl was a professor at the Univ. of Gothenburg from 1978 to 1982.
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 for his study of DNA repair. The three researchers clarified the biochemical mechanisms in three different types of DNA repair, laying the foundation for targeted cancer therapies that leave healthy cells unharmed. Sancar's work focused on nucleotide excision repair, which corrects damage caused by ultraviolet light.