Professor Oliver Smithies Honoured in Berlin
Prof. João B. Pesquero (University of São Paulo, Brasil) (Photo: David Ausserhofer/Copyright: MDC)
Together with Professor Smithies, Professor João B. Pesquero from the University of São Paulo, Brasil, was honoured with the Promotion Prize of the foundation, worth $5,000 US dollars. Both researchers were given the awards during an international conference on the hormone kinin, which plays a role in vascular disease and inflammation processes, at the MaxDelbrückCenter for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch Germany. Both researchers have made crucial contributions to this field of research. Professor Smithies was born in 1925 in Halifax, Great Britain and studied medicine and biochemistry in Oxford. In 1951, he went to the USA to the University of Wisconsin as a postdoc. From 1953 – 1960, he worked at the Connaught Medical Research Laboratory at the University of Toronto, Canada and then went back to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he was a Professor of Genetics and Medical Genetics. Since 1988, he has worked at Chapel Hill focusing now on hypertension and diabetes.
Prof. Oliver Smithies (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA) (Photo: Uwe Eising/Copyright: MDC)
Professor Smithies has received many honours and awards, among them the Wolf Prize in Medicine (2003) and the Albert Lasker Award (2001). Professor Pesquero was born in Penápolis, Brasil, in 1962 and studied chemistry in São Paulo. In 1992, he went to Germany, first to Heidelberg for his postdoc and then, shortly afterwards, to the newly founded MDC in Berlin. Since 2001, he has served as the Scientific Director of the Center for the Development of Animal Models at the University of São Paulo. In 2004, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which enabled him to intensify his long year collaboration with Professor Michael Bader at the MDC.
Barbara Bachtler
Press and Public Affairs
MaxDelbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch
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