Nobel Prize Winners

 


RECORD NUMBER OF WOMEN NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS

Indicative of the accomplishments being made by women in various fields, the Nobel Prize Committee has announced that a record five women have been recognized as Nobel Laureates for 2009 – a milestone in Nobel Prize history and for women worldwide. The honorees are:

Ada E. Yonath
Shares the prize for Chemistry with two male colleagues

The first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize, Yonath was born in Jerusalem and received her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science.  She has worked in Israel her whole life and is the first woman to receive this honor in chemistry since Britain’s Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1964.

Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider
Share the prize for Physiology and Medicine with one other
Australian-born Blackburn currently works in the U.S. at the University of California, San Francisco, while Greider is now at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.  Blackburn is Australia’s first woman to be honored with a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  Until now, only eight women have won this prestigious award in medicine, and this marks the first time that two women have won the prize in the same year.  Blackburn and Greider earned their prize for work done while Greider was a graduate student working with Blackburn, her professor, on telomere research, a field which has drawn a number of women.  Greider attributes this trend to “a jackpot effect, where you have somebody that trains a lot of women, and then there's a slight gravitation of women to work in the labs of other women.”  She argues that it is important to be cognizant of the typical under-representation of women in the sciences and to actively promote their inclusion.

Herta Müller
Winner of the Prize in Literature
Müller was an outsider under Ceausescu's communist dictatorship as she was born a member of Romania’s German minority.  She settled in Germany in 1987 and writes short stories, novels, poems, and essays about the experience of oppression, exile, and conforming to family and state.

Elinor Ostrom
Shares the Nobel Prize for Economics
Ostrom is a Professor at Indiana University where she teaches Political Science, as well as Public and Environmental Affairs.  Recognized "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons," Ostrom spoke of the changing possibilities for women in her field:  “I've attended economic sessions where I've been the only woman in the room, but that is slowly changing and I think there's a greater respect now that women can make a major contribution.”

 

(Sources: www.nobelprize.org, www.ucsf.edu, www.nypost.com, 10/5/2009, www.latimes.com, 10/8/2009, www.nytimes.com, 10/7/2009)