Leadership & Management

Chairman, RTICC Board of Directors

Professor Aaron Ciechanover was born in Haifa, Israel in 1947. He is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at the Technion Faculty of Medicine. Prof. Ciechanover earned his MSc (1971) and MD (1973) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He then completed his national service (1973-1976) as a military physician, and continued his studies towards a doctorate in biological sciences at the Technion Faculty of Medicine (DSc; 1982). There, as a graduate student with Dr. Avram Hershko and in collaboration with Dr. Irwin A. Rose from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, USA, they discovered that covalent attachment of ubiquitin to a target protein signals it for degradation. They deciphered the mechanism of conjugation, described the general proteolytic functions of the system, and proposed a model according to which this modification serves as a recognition signal for a specific downstream protease. Consequently, the system has become an important platform for drug development. Among the numerous prizes Ciechanover received are the 2000 Albert Lasker Award, the 2002 EMET Prize, the 2003 Israel Prize, and the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Profs. Hershko and Rose).