Avram Hershko

Professor Avram Hershko is a Distinguished Professor and Head of Dept. of Biochemstry in the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Hershko received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University. In 1965-67, he worked as a physician in the Israel Defense Forces. In 1969-72, Hershko was a postdoctoral fellow with the late Dr. Gordon Tomkins at the University of California, San Francisco. He has discovered the role of ubiquitin in intracellular protein degradation and defined the enzymatic machinery catalyzing ubiquitin-protein ligation. Ubiquitin-mediated degradation of regulatory proteins is now known to be critical to basic cellular processes such as cell division, signal transduction, transcription and development. He was most notably awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004 in Chemistry. Hershko conducted his research at the Fox Chase Cancer Center about thirty-five years before winning his Nobel honors, shared with his collaborators, Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and an adjunct professor at NYU as well.