Departures of note

Ada Yonath was an Israeli crystallographer and professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, best known for her pioneering work on the structure and function of the ribosome. Born in Jerusalem to immigrant parents from Poland, she studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned her PhD from the Weizmann Institute in 1968, later completing postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon and MIT.

In 1970 she established the first protein crystallography laboratory in Israel, and over the following decades she developed ribosomal crystallography, a research line pursued despite widespread scientific skepticism. She introduced cryo bio-crystallography and determined the high-resolution structures of both ribosomal subunits, revealing the ribosome as a ribozyme and illuminating how antibiotics target it, which paved the way for structure-based drug design.

In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz, becoming the first Israeli woman and the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences. She also received the Israel Prize in 2002, the Wolf Prize, and numerous other international honors, and was a member of several national academies of science.