Princeton University Alumna Awarded Nobel Prize In Chemistry

PRINCETON, NJ — Princeton alumna Dr. Frances Arnold was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the directed evolution of enzymes.”

Directed evolution was pioneered by Dr. Arnold in the early 1990s and is a bio-engineering method for creating new and better enzymes in the laboratory using the principles of evolution, according to a press conference by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on Wednesday.

The prize was divided, one half awarded to Arnold, and the other half was divided between George Smith of the University of Missouri-Columbia and Sir Gregory Winter of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge “for the phage display of peptides and antibodies.”

Arnold graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering. She is currently the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the Caltech.

“Frances Arnold is a groundbreaking chemist whose research has had far-reaching impact on the development of chemical substances, from pharmaceuticals to biofuels. I am thrilled that she has won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,” said Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber. “Professor Arnold’s scientific excellence and intellectual leadership exemplify values essential to our University, and all of us at Princeton are celebrating her receipt of this well-deserved honor.”

Arnold is the first Princeton alumna (female graduate of either the undergraduate program or the Graduate School) to win a Nobel Prize. She is the third woman associated with the University to win a Nobel Prize — the second is Donna Strickland, one of the recipients of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics announced Tuesday, who was an academic professional at Princeton’s Advanced Technology Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials from 1992 to 1996. The first was Toni Morrison, Princeton’s Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, according to Princeton University.

(Photo courtesy of Caltech: Frances Arnold)

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