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Joachim Frank
Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry 2017
Joachim Frank received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.”
Joachim Frank is a professor of biochemistry, molecular biophysics and biological sciences at Columbia University. He worked on his dissertation under Walter Hoppe’s mentorship at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. In 1970, he received his PhD from the Technical University of Munich. A two-year Harkness Fellowship allowed him to visit three labs in the USA for postdoctoral research. After a brief return to Munich, Frank spent three years at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge working in the lab of Vernon Ellis Cosslett. In 1975, he joined the Wadsworth Center in Albany as a senior research scientist. In 1985 Frank joined the biomedical sciences faculty at the State University of New York at Albany School of Public Health. In 2008 he moved to New York to assume his current role at Columbia. From 1998 to 2017, Frank was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Frank’s lab has developed techniques of electron microscopy and single-particle reconstruction of biological macromolecules, specialising in math/computational approaches. He applied these techniques of visualisation to explore the structure and dynamics of the ribosome during protein synthesis and the structure and gating mechanisms of several ion channels.
Frank is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Microbiology. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was honoured for his contributions to the development of cryo-EM of biological molecules with the 2014 Franklin Medal for Life Science. In 2017 he shared the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences with Richard Henderson and Marin van Heel.
More about Joachim Frank and the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry