Roger Y. Tsien (2008, Professor, Department of Pharmacology, UCSD School of Medicine/Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, UC San Diego)

Chemist Roger Tsien is no stranger to innovative compounds. His own career has been a “strange mixture of chance and fateful predisposition,” he wrote in his autobiography on the Nobel Prize Web site. Since he decided the chemistry set his parents bought him as a boy was too tame, he turned to a library book to devise more ambitious experiments. After graduating from Harvard College at age 20 with a degree in chemistry and physics and completing a PhD in physiology at the University of Cambridge, Tsien was faced with a dilemma: “Biological departments considered me a chemist, while chemistry departments rejected me as a biologist,” he wrote. Once he landed at UCSD in 1989, it was this very versatility that led him to investigate the subject for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008: how fluorescent proteins work in Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish. More >

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2007)

The IPCC’s fourth report, released last year, stated with near-certainty that global warming is man-made. The panel’s roster of researchers lists nearly two dozen scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, including Mario Molina, V. Ramanathan, Richard Somerville and Lynne Talley. The panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former vice president Al Gore, for their work to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change. More >

Sydney Brenner (2002, Adjunct Professor, Biological Sciences)

Seeing a model of the structure of DNA in 1953 in Cambridge was the watershed moment in Sydney Brenner’s scientific career. “The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable — it was the birth of molecular biology,” he wrote in his autobiography on the Nobel Prize Web site. Five decades later, Brenner shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for solving some of these problems himself. In the early 1960s, he established the existence of messenger RNA, or mRNA, which can be translated into proteins, and demonstrated that the nucleotide sequence of mRNA determines the order of amino acids in proteins. Brenner is currently on the faculty of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. More >

Robert F. Engle (2003, Professor Emeritus, Economics)

Robert Engle remembers his first years at UC San Diego as the golden era of econometrics, the discipline that would earn him a Nobel Prize in 2003 shared with Clive Granger, now also a UC San Diego professor emeritus. The two received the prize for their pioneering work in statistical modeling of economic data. An enormously influential thinker in modern economics, Engle’s work, along with Granger’s, has fundamentally changed the way economists think about financial and macroeconomic data. Engle’s most important contribution was his ground-breaking discovery of a method for analyzing unpredictable movements in financial market prices and interest rates. Accurate characterization and prediction of these volatile movements are essential for quantifying and effectively managing risk. Engle joined the faculty of UCSD in 1975 and retired in 2003. More >

Clive W.J. Granger (2003, Professor Emeritus, Economics)

Clive Granger once said that his life was just a series of lucky breaks. The luckiest of all must have come in 2003, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, with Robert Engle, now also a professor emeritus at UC San Diego. Granger received the prize for his discoveries in the analysis of time-series data, which are sequences of numerical observations over time, such as stock prices each day or the levels of national income each year. His work fundamentally changed the way economists think about macroeconomic data. “Take three active workers who interact, mix in a group of good students, and later add Jim Hamilton, Graham Elliott, and Allan Timmermann, and in under 30 years you produce a couple of Nobel Prizes, at least,” he wrote in his autobiography posted on the Nobel Prize Web site. Granger passed away May 27, 2009. More >

Mario J. Molina (1995, Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry/Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego)

Mario Molina’s career as a chemist began early, when he turned a spare bathroom in his parents’ home into a laboratory. His career and education continued in more impressive settings, including UC Berkeley, and later the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, where he taught and did research before joining the UC San Diego faculty in 2004. In 1995, Molina shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sherwood Rowland of U.C. Irvine and Paul Crutzen, also now on the UC San Diego faculty, for elucidating the threat of chlorofluorocarbon gases to the Earth’s ozone layer. More recently, the Mexico native has focused much of his work on the chemistry of air pollution in the lower atmosphere. More >

Harry Markowitz
(1990, Adjunct Professor of Finance,
Rady School of Management)

The basic concepts of the theory that would earn Harry Markowitz the Nobel Prize came to him one afternoon in the library, while reading John Burr Williams's “Theory of Investment Value.” Markowitz sought to show that a diversified portfolio, where assets are allocated broadly to maximize return and minimize risk, could be optimal for investors. In 1990, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work in the theory of financial economics. At the time, he was on the faculty at the City University of New York. He joined the UC San Diego faculty in 1994 in the economics department, then became a professor at the Rady School of Management in 2006. More >

Renato Dulbecco
(1975, Professor Emeritus, Department of Pathology)

As a doctor, Renato Dulbecco served on the French and Russian fronts during WWII, and later became the physician of two local resistance units in his native Italy. But it’s only after the war that he was able to realize one of his dreams: working in genetics. Three decades later, in 1975, Dulbecco received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell. He was a researcher at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory London at the time. He later served as the president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. More >

George Palade (1974, Advisor to the vice chancellor for Health Sciences and the dean of the UCSD School of Medicine)

George Palade dedicated his career to understanding the inner workings of the cell. In 1974, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to the understanding of cell structure, chemistry and function. Palade came to UC San Diego from Yale University in 1990 to serve as the UCSD School of Medicine’s first dean for Scientific Affairs, where he created one of the preeminent cell biology programs in the nation, and served as a professor of Medicine. He held both posts until his retirement in 2001 at the age of 88. Palade passed away on October 7, 2008. More >

DECEASED

Hannes Alfven received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Francis Crick received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer received the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Robert Holley received the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Linus Pauling received the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Harold Urey received the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.