Aziz Sancar

Aziz Sancar is a Turkish-American molecular biologist recognized for his foundational work on DNA repair mechanisms, for which he shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich. His research has centered on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria, discoveries that reshaped the field. Born into a lower-middle-class family in the Savur district of Mardin Province, southeastern Turkey, in 1946, he was the seventh of eight children. His parents were uneducated but prioritized his schooling, and he was inspired by teachers trained in Village Institutes. After initially wanting to study chemistry, he was persuaded by classmates to pursue medicine, earning his MD from Istanbul University in 1969 as the top student. He then worked as a doctor in Savur for a year and a half before winning a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University for biochemistry, but returned to Savur after a similar period due to difficulty adapting. He later completed a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Texas at Dallas under Claud Stan Rupert, studying the photoreactivating enzyme of *E. coli*. As part of his dissertation in 1976, he cloned the gene for photolyase, which repairs thymine dimers caused by ultraviolet light. After three rejected postdoctoral applications, he worked as a laboratory technician at Yale University for five years, where he began his influential work on nucleotide excision repair. In Dean Rupp’s lab, he identified the UvrABC endonuclease and its coding genes, showing that these enzymes cut the damaged DNA strand twice, removing a 12–13 nucleotide segment. He then joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a lecturer, the only positive response from fifty applications, where he continued studying bacterial repair and its more complex human counterpart. Sancar is currently the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the UNC School of Medicine and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He co-founded the Aziz & Gwen Sancar Foundation to promote Turkish culture and support Turkish students in the United States. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 as its first Turkish member.