Aziz Sancar

Aziz Sancar was born on September 8, 1946, in Savur, a small town in southeastern Turkey, the seventh of eight children in a family of modest means. His early education took place in a one-room village school, yet he proved academically exceptional, eventually gaining admission to Istanbul University's School of Medicine, from which he graduated in 1969. Unable at first to secure funding for research abroad, he worked as a country physician in Turkey before finding a path to doctoral study at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he earned his PhD in molecular biology in 1977.

He completed postdoctoral research at Yale University and then joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has spent his entire academic career. His laboratory became a world centre for the study of DNA repair — the molecular machinery that living cells use to detect and correct damage in their genetic code caused by ultraviolet light, chemical mutagens, and other environmental insults.

Sancar's most celebrated discovery is the detailed biochemical mechanism of nucleotide excision repair (NER), the process by which cells cut out and replace damaged sections of DNA. He also made foundational contributions to understanding circadian clock mechanisms and their relationship to DNA repair timing. In 2015 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Paul Modrich and Tomas Lindahl for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair, becoming the first Turkish scientist to receive a Nobel Prize in the sciences.

He remains active in research at UNC Chapel Hill. A committed supporter of Turkish science education, Sancar and his wife Gwen have established scholarships for Turkish students studying in the United States.