Columbia Professor Wins Nobel Prize For Chemistry

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, NY — A Columbia University professor won the Pulitzer Prize for chemistry for his work on a team that developed a method to generate three-dimensional images of molecules, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Wednesday.

Joachim Frank, who runs the Frank Lab at Columbia University, was awarded for work that "both simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules," according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Frank and teammates Jacques Dubochet of Switzerland and Richard Henderson of the United Kingdom developed a method of cryo-electron microscopy to better visualize the molecules.

"This method has moved biochemistry into a new era," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.

In addition to running the Frank Lab, Frank serves as a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of biological sciences at Columbia, according to a faculty biography page. He was born in Germany and received a degree from the University of Munich. Frank did his doctoral research at the Technical University of Munich and postdoctoral research in the United States and the United Kingdom, according to a faculty page.

Cryo-electron microscopy is the process of freezing biomolecules mid-movement in order to visualize processes that were previously unobservable. Frank is credited with developing "an image processing method in which the electron microscope’s fuzzy twodimensional images are analysed and merged to reveal a sharp three-dimensional structure," according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Columbia Univeristy congratulated the professor for his achievement Wednesday.

Photo by Clive Dudley via Flickr/Creative Commons