Professor Michael Glickman of Technion to Receive Bessel Research Award

With the award, which is endowed with 45,000 euros, Professor Glickman will intensify his long-standing collaboration with the cell biologist Professor Thomas Sommer at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, and he will also conduct research at the MDC. The award will be presented to him in the spring of next year.

Professor Glickman is studying yeast cells to gain insight into a cell system that degrades proteins in a controlled manner. This system ensures that superfluous or defective proteins are marked with a molecular tag, the protein ubiquitin, and are disposed of in the cellular shredding machine, the proteasome. This ubiquitin-proteasome system is found in all eukaryotic cells and is – as its name indicates – ubiquitous. It is one of the body’s most complex cellular systems and protects the body against serious diseases. Defective proteins that elude this system trigger serious diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, cystic fibrosis or diabetes.

The discoverer of this cell protection program is Professor Aaron Ciechanover (Technion). In 2004 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Professor Avram Hershko (Technion) and Professor Irwin Rose (University of California, Irvine, CA, USA) for this discovery. Professor Ciechanover – he received the Humboldt Research Award of AvH endowed with 60,000 Euros in 2011 –, Professor Glickman and Professor Sommer have been collaborating closely for many years and have gained important insights into how this cell protection system functions.

Michael Glickman studied chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel and obtained his PhD degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. From there he went to Harvard Medical School in Boston. In 1998 he became Senior Lecturer at the Technion – Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, where he has been full professor since 2009. He has been Visiting Scientist/​Visiting Professor in the U.S. at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland and at the University of Maryland as well as in France at the Institute Jacques Monod and the Université Paris Diderot in Paris. Michael Glickman was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1964 and lived in the U.S., France and Israel intermittently before settling down in Haifa, where he now lives. In April 2012 Professor Glickman, together with Professor Thomas Sommer, received the award of the German Technion Society (Hannover). The award was conferred in recognition of the outstanding contributions of the two researchers to scientific collaboration between Germany and Israel.

Contact

Barbara Bachtler
Press Department
Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch
in the Helmholtz Association
Robert-Rössle-Straße 10
13125 Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49 (0) 30 94 06 — 38 96
Fax: +49 (0) 30 94 06 — 38 33
e‑mail: presse@​mdc-​berlin.​de