Important personalitiesBack

Thomas Arthur Steitz (born August 23, 1940) is the Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Yale University, New Haven.

Steitz was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". Steitz also won the Gairdner International Award in 2007 "for his studies on the structure and function of the ribosome which showed that the peptidyl transferase was an RNA catalyzed reaction, and for revealing the mechanism of inhibition of this function by antibiotics".


Career

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Steitz studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Lawrence University, graduating in 1962. While there he was a member of the fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, the Delta Nu chapter. In June 2010, the University renamed its chemistry building Thomas A. Steitz Hall of Science.

He received a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University in 1966 where he worked under the direction of subsequent 1976 chemistry Nobel Prize winner William N. Lipscomb, Jr. While at Harvard, after the training task of determining the structure of the small molecule methyl ethylene phosphate, Steitz made these contributions to determining the atomic structures of carboxypeptidase A and aspartate carbamoyltransferase,  each the largest atomic structure determined in its time. The structure of the large 50S ribosomal subunit, which Steitz later determined in his own lab at Yale University, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize is even larger.

Steitz did postdoctoral research as a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University during 1967–1970. He was also a Macy Fellow at the University of Göttingen during 1976–1977 and a Fairchild Scholar at the California Institute of Technology during 1984-1985.