223 laureates · 1905–2025
The laureates
Every Jewish Nobel laureate, by the standard of Wikipedia’s list: Jews, or people with at least one Jewish parent. 5 borderline cases are included and flagged as disputed. Each profile explains the work, what it meant for humanity, what went wrong, and what the laureate faced.
- Women
- 12
- Refugees or exiles
- 50
- Profiles researched
- 223 of 223
Results
Showing 223 of 223 laureates
Chemistry · 1905
Adolf von Baeyer
He worked out how to build indigo in the lab, opening the way to the cheap synthetic blue that colours the world's jeans.
Chemistry · 1906
Henri Moissan
He freed fluorine, a fiercely reactive element, and built an electric furnace so hot that it opened up high-temperature chemistry.
Physics · 1907
Albert A. Michelson
An immigrant boy from a gold-rush camp who learned to measure the world with light waves, from the metre to the size of a star.
Physics · 1908
Gabriel Lippmann
He captured colour by trapping light waves in a photographic plate, and his electrometer recorded the first human electrocardiogram.
Medicine · 1908
Ilya Mechnikov
A zoologist who pushed thorns into starfish larvae and saw what others had missed: cells that swallow germs defend the body.
Medicine · 1908
Paul Ehrlich
He dreamed of 'magic bullets' that kill germs but spare the patient; his lab built one: Salvarsan, the first effective syphilis drug.
Chemistry · 1910
Otto Wallach
He sorted out the tangled chemistry of plant scents, helping lay the scientific groundwork for today's perfume and flavor industries.
Literature · 1910
Paul Heyse
A master of the German novella who carried Italy's poets into German and, at 80, won the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Peace · 1911
Alfred Fried
A self-taught Viennese bookseller who argued that war would end only when nations built shared rules and institutions to replace anarchy.
Peace · 1911
Tobias Asser
He brought nations to The Hague to agree whose law applies when marriages, lawsuits and families cross borders.
Medicine · 1914
Robert Bárány
He turned a dizzy patient's complaint into the ear-water test that still shows doctors whether our balance organs work.
Chemistry · 1915
Richard Willstätter
He revealed what chlorophyll, the green pigment behind photosynthesis, is made of, then quit in protest at antisemitism and fled the Nazis.
Refugee
Chemistry · 1918
Fritz Haber
He found a way to turn nitrogen in the air into fertilizer that now feeds about half of humanity, and he also pioneered poison-gas warfare.
Refugee
Physics · 1921
Albert Einstein
He showed that light comes in packets and that gravity is curved space and time, ideas now built into solar cells, lasers and GPS.
Refugee
Physics · 1922
Niels Bohr
His 1913 model of the atom helped launch quantum physics; he sheltered refugee scientists and pleaded for an open world after the bomb.
Refugee
Medicine · 1922
Otto Meyerhof
He showed how working muscles get energy from sugar and helped map how cells break it down, then twice fled the Nazis.
Refugee
Physics · 1925
Gustav Hertz
His electron-collision experiment with James Franck proved that atoms take in energy only in fixed steps, a pillar of quantum physics.
Disputed inclusion
Physics · 1925
James Franck
He helped show that atoms take in energy in fixed packets, quit his post over Nazi racial laws and warned against a surprise atomic attack.
Refugee
Literature · 1927
Henri Bergson
A philosopher of lived time and free will who packed lecture halls, then stood with persecuted Jews rather than accept Vichy's exemption.
Medicine · 1930
Karl Landsteiner
He discovered the human blood groups, the key to turning blood transfusion from a deadly gamble into routine, life-saving medicine.
Medicine · 1931
Otto Warburg
He found the iron enzyme that lets cells use oxygen and spotted cancer's hunger for sugar, the clue behind PET cancer scans.
Medicine · 1936
Otto Loewi
With two frog hearts he proved that nerves signal with chemicals, a basis for many medicines, before the Nazis drove him from Austria.
Refugee
Chemistry · 1943
George de Hevesy
He learned to track atoms by their radiation, pioneering the tracer method behind nuclear medicine scans and treatments.
Refugee
Physics · 1943
Otto Stern
His beams of atoms showed quantum rules at work and seeded the magnetic resonance behind MRI and the atomic clocks behind GPS.
Refugee
Physics · 1944
Isidor Isaac Rabi
He tuned radio waves to the spin of atomic nuclei, the idea behind MRI scanners, NMR chemistry and the atomic clocks that time GPS.
Medicine · 1944
Joseph Erlanger
He timed signals racing along nerves and found thick fibers fast and thin ones slow, a key to how we feel touch and pain.
Medicine · 1945
Ernst B. Chain
A refugee chemist who fled Nazi Berlin, he helped purify penicillin and prove it could cure deadly infections.
Refugee
Physics · 1945
Wolfgang Pauli
His exclusion principle helps explain why atoms have shells, chemistry works and matter holds its shape; he also predicted the neutrino.
Refugee
Medicine · 1946
Hermann J. Muller
He proved that X-rays can change genes, giving science mutations on demand, then warned the world to protect its genes from radiation.
Disputed inclusion
Medicine · 1947
Gerty Cori
She showed how the body stores and releases sugar, and with her husband traced a deadly childhood disease to one missing enzyme.
Medicine · 1950
Tadeus Reichstein
He helped decode the adrenal hormones behind cortisone and Addison's treatment, and found the first practical way to mass-produce vitamin C.
Refugee
Physics · 1952
Felix Bloch
He found a way to pick up the faint magnetic signals of atomic nuclei, the physics behind NMR chemistry and hospital MRI scanners.
Refugee
Medicine · 1952
Selman A. Waksman
His systematic hunt through soil microbes produced streptomycin, the first drug that could cure tuberculosis.
Medicine · 1953
Fritz Lipmann
Pushed out of Europe by Nazism, he found coenzyme A, the molecular forklift cells use to turn food into energy and new parts.
Refugee
Medicine · 1953
Hans Krebs
Driven out of Nazi Germany, he mapped the chemical cycle that turns food into energy in almost every oxygen-breathing cell.
Refugee
Physics · 1954
Max Born
He showed that quantum physics speaks in probabilities, then fled Nazi Germany and spent his last years warning against nuclear war.
Refugee
Literature · 1958
Boris Pasternak
A poet who stayed in Stalin's Russia, wrote Doctor Zhivago, and was forced by his own government to turn down the Nobel Prize.
Physics · 1958
Igor Y. Tamm
He explained the blue glow of particles outrunning light in water, a key to modern detectors, and co-proposed the tokamak for fusion.
Disputed inclusion
Physics · 1958
Il´ja M. Frank
He helped explain the blue glow made when particles outrun light in water, turning a faint curiosity into a tool for physics and medicine.
Medicine · 1958
Joshua Lederberg
He showed that bacteria swap genes, opening the way to genetic engineering and to understanding how germs share drug resistance.
Medicine · 1959
Arthur Kornberg
He found DNA polymerase, the first known enzyme that copies DNA, and his lab's enzymes became tools of genetic engineering.
Physics · 1959
Emilio Segrè
A refugee from Fascist Italy's racial laws who helped find the proton's antimatter twin and an isotope used in millions of medical scans.
Refugee
Physics · 1960
Donald A. Glaser
His bubble chamber let physicists see the paths of invisible particles, and he later co-founded Cetus, often called the first biotech firm.
Chemistry · 1961
Melvin Calvin
The son of a Jewish immigrant, he led the team that traced how plants turn air, water and sunlight into sugar.
Physics · 1961
Robert Hofstadter
He bounced electrons off atomic nuclei to show that protons have size and structure; his crystal detector became nuclear medicine's eye.
Physics · 1962
Lev Landau
He explained why liquid helium flows without friction, and his ideas and textbooks became the working language of condensed-matter physics.
Chemistry · 1962
Max F. Perutz
He spent 22 years on the first 3D picture of hemoglobin, then showed how the blood protein picks up and delivers oxygen.
Refugee
Physics · 1963
Eugene Wigner
Used the mathematics of symmetry to decode atoms and nuclei, then led the design of the first large nuclear reactors, for war and peace.
Refugee
Medicine · 1964
Konrad Bloch
Forced out of Nazi Germany, he helped map how the body builds cholesterol, the chemistry that statin drugs later learned to block.
Refugee
Medicine · 1965
André Lwoff
He showed that a virus can hide silently inside a cell's genes until a signal wakes it, a key to how genes are switched on and off.
Medicine · 1965
François Jacob
He showed how cells switch their genes on and off, and helped find messenger RNA, the molecule behind today's mRNA vaccines.
Physics · 1965
Julian Schwinger
He tamed the infinities in the quantum theory of light and matter, chose radar over the bomb, and trained four future Nobel laureates.
Physics · 1965
Richard P. Feynman
His diagrams made the quantum physics of light and matter calculable; he also worked on the atomic bomb and showed why Challenger failed.
Literature · 1966
Nelly Sachs
A Berlin poet who escaped the Nazis in 1940 and, in Swedish exile, wrote poems mourning the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Refugee
Literature · 1966
Shmuel Agnon
He wrote modern Hebrew fiction in the language of ancient Jewish texts, preserving a lost Jewish world and winning Hebrew its first Nobel.
Medicine · 1967
George Wald
He found vitamin A at the heart of the eye's light sensor and helped show how light straightens it, the first step of seeing.
Physics · 1967
Hans Bethe
Explained how the Sun and stars shine, helped build the atomic bomb, then spent six decades working to rein in nuclear weapons.
Refugee
Medicine · 1968
Marshall W. Nirenberg
With a colleague, he read the first word of the genetic code, showing how cells turn the letters of their genes into proteins.
Peace · 1968
René Cassin
A wounded WWI veteran, sentenced to death by Vichy, who helped write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for every person.
Physics · 1969
Murray Gell-Mann
He brought order to a zoo of subatomic particles and proposed quarks, the building blocks of nearly all the matter in our bodies.
Medicine · 1969
Salvador E. Luria
A refugee from Fascist Italy, he helped prove that bacteria mutate at random, a key to understanding why germs outwit our drugs.
Refugee
Medicine · 1970
Julius Axelrod
He showed how nerve cells recycle their chemical messengers, the key to modern antidepressants, and helped bring paracetamol into medicine.
Economics · 1970
Paul A. Samuelson
He rebuilt economics on mathematics, taught it to generations of students, and helped spark the low-cost index fund.
Medicine · 1970
Sir Bernard Katz
A stateless Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who found that nerves pass their messages in tiny packets of chemical.
Refugee
Physics · 1971
Dennis Gabor
A refugee engineer who invented holography, a way to record the whole of a light wave, now used to test machines and guard money.
Refugee
Economics · 1971
Simon Kuznets
He taught nations to measure their own economies, building the income figures behind GDP, and warned what those numbers cannot show.
Chemistry · 1972
Christian Anfinsen
He showed that a protein's chain of amino acids alone decides its shape, the rule behind today's AI protein-structure prediction.
Medicine · 1972
Gerald M. Edelman
He worked out the chemical structure of antibodies, the immune system's Y-shaped defenders, laying groundwork for antibody medicines.
Economics · 1972
Kenneth J. Arrow
He proved when markets can balance and why no voting system is perfectly fair, then turned economics against malaria.
Physics · 1972
Leon N. Cooper
He showed how electrons pair up, the key to current flowing with zero resistance, then turned to how the brain learns.
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Chemistry · 1972
William H. Stein
He helped build the tools that measure proteins' building blocks, then used them to spell out the first complete sequence of an enzyme.
Physics · 1973
Brian D. Josephson
At 22 he predicted how electron pairs tunnel between superconductors, giving the world an exact volt and ultra-sensitive magnetic sensors.
Peace · 1973
Henry Kissinger
A teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, he negotiated the 1973 Vietnam ceasefire and reshaped Cold War diplomacy, at a heavy human cost.
Refugee
Economics · 1973
Wassily Leontief
He mapped how every industry feeds every other, giving nations a tool to plan, measure their economies and trace pollution.
Refugee
Physics · 1975
Aage N. Bohr
After fleeing occupied Denmark, he showed that atomic nuclei can stretch out of round and spin, uniting rival pictures of the nucleus.
RefugeeDisputed inclusion
Physics · 1975
Ben R. Mottelson
Showed how the protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus move both on their own and together, reshaping nuclear physics.
Medicine · 1975
David Baltimore
He found the enzyme that lets viruses write RNA back into DNA, a key to understanding and treating HIV.
Medicine · 1975
Howard M. Temin
He proved some viruses copy their RNA genes into DNA, an idea once called heresy that later guided the first HIV drugs.
Economics · 1975
Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich
He invented linear programming, the math of getting the most from scarce resources, and fought Soviet dogma to see it used.
Medicine · 1976
Baruch S. Blumberg
He discovered the hepatitis B virus and co-invented its vaccine, the first vaccine that protects people against a cancer.
Physics · 1976
Burton Richter
He built the collider that caught the psi particle, proof of a fourth quark, and let its X-rays out to serve biology and materials science.
Economics · 1976
Milton Friedman
He traced the Great Depression to the Fed's mistakes, reshaped how central banks fight inflation and panics, and helped end the US draft.
Literature · 1976
Saul Bellow
A Chicago immigrant's son whose comic, searching novels put Jewish American lives at the center of American literature.
Chemistry · 1977
Ilya Prigogine
He showed how a steady flow of energy can build order out of disorder, helping explain the rhythms and patterns of life.
Refugee
Medicine · 1977
Rosalyn Yalow
A nuclear physicist who learned to measure tiny traces of hormones in blood, changing how doctors diagnose diabetes and thyroid disease.
Physics · 1978
Arno Penzias
A child refugee from Nazi Germany, he found the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, key evidence that our universe had a beginning.
Refugee
Medicine · 1978
Daniel Nathans
He showed that bacterial enzymes could cut DNA into exact, mappable pieces, the first step behind gene cloning, testing and sequencing.
Economics · 1978
Herbert Simon
Showed that people and firms settle for 'good enough', then taught computers to reason, helping to found artificial intelligence.
Literature · 1978
Isaac Bashevis Singer
He kept writing in Yiddish after the Holocaust destroyed its heartland, and carried the lost world of Polish Jews to readers everywhere.
Peace · 1978
Menachem Begin
A former Soviet prisoner and underground commander who, as Israel's prime minister, made Israel's first peace with an Arab state.
Refugee
Chemistry · 1979
Herbert C. Brown
A Depression-era student from a struggling immigrant family, he made boron into a standard tool chemists use to build medicines.
Physics · 1979
Sheldon Glashow
A plumber's son, child of Jewish immigrants, who helped show that the force behind light and a force that helps the Sun shine are one.
Physics · 1979
Steven Weinberg
A stenographer's son who showed that the force carrying light and the force that helps the Sun burn are one.
Medicine · 1980
Baruj Benacerraf
He showed that our genes help decide which invaders our immune system can respond to, a key to transplants, vaccines and autoimmune disease.
Economics · 1980
Lawrence R. Klein
He turned economic theory into working models of whole economies, so leaders could forecast downturns and test policies before using them.
Chemistry · 1980
Paul Berg
In 1972 he joined DNA from two species into one molecule, starting the genetic engineering behind many modern medicines.
Chemistry · 1980
Walter Gilbert
He found a chemical way to read DNA letter by letter, turning genes into text that doctors and scientists could study.
Physics · 1981
Arthur L. Schawlow
He co-wrote the 1958 blueprint for the laser, then used laser light to measure atoms with new precision.
Literature · 1981
Elias Canetti
A Sephardic Jewish refugee from Nazi Vienna who spent decades studying how crowds form and how power rests on the threat of death.
Refugee
Chemistry · 1981
Roald Hoffmann
A child who hid from the Nazis in an attic grew up to show chemists how to predict which way a reaction will go.
Refugee
Chemistry · 1982
Aaron Klug
He taught electron microscopes to see in 3D, revealing how viruses and chromosomes are built, and found the DNA-gripping zinc finger.
Medicine · 1982
John R. Vane
He found how aspirin works and co-discovered prostacyclin, explaining aspirin's heart benefits and helping start a new class of heart drugs.
Medicine · 1984
César Milstein
With Georges Köhler, he found how to make unlimited pure antibodies on demand, the basis of antibody medicines and pregnancy tests.
Economics · 1985
Franco Modigliani
Driven from Italy by Mussolini's racial laws, he explained how families save over a lifetime and what really sets a company's value.
Refugee
Chemistry · 1985
Herbert A. Hauptman
A mathematician who, with Jerome Karle, cracked crystallography's phase problem so chemists could read molecular shapes from X-ray data.
Chemistry · 1985
Jerome Karle
He helped write the math that lets X-rays reveal a molecule's shape directly, turning years of crystal puzzle-solving into routine work.
Medicine · 1985
Joseph L. Goldstein
With Michael Brown he found the LDL receptor, the cell's doorway for cholesterol, explaining inherited heart attacks and how statins work.
Medicine · 1985
Michael S. Brown
With Joseph Goldstein he found the LDL receptor, showing how cells pull cholesterol from the blood and how statins protect hearts.
Peace · 1986
Elie Wiesel
An Auschwitz survivor who turned his memories into Night and a lifelong fight against indifference to suffering anywhere.
Refugee
Chemistry · 1986
John C. Polanyi
He read the faint infrared glow of newborn molecules to see how chemical reactions happen, and his idea led to the chemical laser.
Refugee
Medicine · 1986
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Barred from her university by Fascist race laws, she kept working in her bedroom and went on to discover the first growth factor.
Refugee
Medicine · 1986
Stanley Cohen
He found EGF, the signal that tells skin cells to grow, and its receptor, now the target of drugs for lung and bowel cancer.
Literature · 1987
Joseph Brodsky
A Leningrad poet tried as a 'parasite' and expelled by the Soviet state, who became a Nobel laureate and America's Poet Laureate.
Refugee
Physics · 1987
K. Alex Müller
He bet that humble ceramics could carry current with zero resistance, and opened the era of high-temperature superconductors.
Economics · 1987
Robert M. Solow
He showed that better ideas and skills, more than extra machines, are what make nations richer over time.
Medicine · 1988
Gertrude B. Elion
She designed drugs that help cure childhood leukemia and made organ transplants workable, and helped create the first selective herpes drug.
Physics · 1988
Jack Steinberger
Sent out of Nazi Germany at 13, he helped turn ghostly neutrinos into a beam and showed that matter's lightest particles come in families.
Refugee
Physics · 1988
Leon M. Lederman
A laundryman's son from the Bronx, he helped prove there are two kinds of neutrino, then spent decades bringing science to schoolchildren.
Physics · 1988
Melvin Schwartz
He turned the ghostly neutrino into a beam physicists could aim, and used it to show nature has more than one kind of neutrino.
Medicine · 1989
Harold E. Varmus
He showed that cancer genes are corrupted copies of our own growth genes, a key step toward drugs that target cancer.
Chemistry · 1989
Sidney Altman
He showed that RNA, long seen as a mere messenger, can work as an enzyme, a finding that rewrote textbooks and hinted at how life began.
- HM
Economics · 1990
Harry M. Markowitz
He turned the old advice not to put all your eggs in one basket into math that now shapes how retirement savings are invested.
Physics · 1990
Jerome I. Friedman
He helped find the first direct evidence of quarks, showing that the protons and neutrons in every atom are built from smaller parts.
- MM
Economics · 1990
Merton H. Miller
He showed that what a company does with its money matters more than how it raises it, laying the groundwork of modern corporate finance.
Literature · 1991
Nadine Gordimer
A novelist who showed the world how apartheid poisoned ordinary lives, while quietly helping the movement that ended it.
Medicine · 1992
Edmond H. Fischer
He helped find the chemical on-off switch that controls proteins in our cells, now the target of dozens of cancer drugs.
Economics · 1992
Gary Becker
He used economics to explain schooling, crime, prejudice and family life, and showed why investing in people pays off.
Physics · 1992
Georges Charpak
A Dachau survivor, he strung hair-thin wires into detectors that let physicists catch rare particles and doctors use gentler X-rays.
Refugee
Chemistry · 1992
Rudolph A. Marcus
He explained why electrons hop between molecules fast or slow, the step at the heart of photosynthesis, rust and batteries.
Economics · 1993
Robert W. Fogel
He used numbers to rewrite American history, from railroads and slavery to why people today grow taller and live longer.
Medicine · 1994
Alfred G. Gilman
He purified the first G-protein, the switch that carries hormone and drug signals into our cells.
Chemistry · 1994
George A. Olah
Hidden in Budapest as a teenager in 1944, he later used superacids to trap fleeting carbon ions, knowledge behind cleaner fuels.
Refugee
Economics · 1994
John C. Harsanyi
He escaped deportation in 1944, then gave economists the tools to analyze deals where each side hides what it knows.
Refugee
Medicine · 1994
Martin Rodbell
He found that cells pass outside messages inward through a GTP-powered switch, key to how hormones, senses and many drugs work.
Economics · 1994
Reinhard Selten
He gave economists a test for spotting empty threats, and helped make the laboratory a place to study how real people decide.
Peace · 1994
Shimon Peres
He built Israel's military might, then spent decades pursuing peace, signing the 1993 Oslo declaration with the PLO.
Peace · 1994
Yitzhak Rabin
A general who led Israel's army in 1967, then signed peace deals with the Palestinians and Jordan, and was killed for it.
Physics · 1995
Frederick Reines
He caught the 'undetectable' neutrino in 1956, opening a new window on stars and matter, after years spent testing nuclear weapons.
Peace · 1995
Joseph Rotblat
A physicist who walked away from the atomic bomb project and spent 60 years working to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Physics · 1995
Martin L. Perl
A chemical engineer turned physicist, he found the tau, the first evidence that matter's building blocks come in three families.
Physics · 1996
David M. Lee
He helped show that rare helium-3 becomes a frictionless superfluid near absolute zero, opening a new window on quantum matter.
Physics · 1996
Douglas D. Osheroff
As a graduate student he spotted the tiny kink that revealed superfluid helium-3, a new form of quantum matter near absolute zero.
Chemistry · 1996
Sir Harold Kroto
He helped find the buckyball, a football-shaped carbon molecule that opened a new chemistry, then spent his fame teaching science.
Physics · 1997
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
He explained how laser light can chill atoms to near absolute zero, opening the way to ultra-precise clocks and new quantum physics.
Economics · 1997
Myron Scholes
With Fischer Black he found how to price an option, giving firms and investors a common way to measure and shed financial risk.
Economics · 1997
Robert C. Merton
He helped crack the pricing of options, giving banks, firms and savers a shared way to value and trade financial risk.
Medicine · 1997
Stanley B. Prusiner
He showed that a misfolded protein with no genes can spread infection in the brain, explaining mad cow disease and related dementias.
Medicine · 1998
Robert F. Furchgott
He found that the lining of blood vessels sends a signal, later shown to be nitric oxide gas, that tells arteries to relax.
Chemistry · 1998
Walter Kohn
Refugee from Nazi Vienna whose density-functional theory lets computers predict how molecules and materials behave.
Refugee
Chemistry · 2000
Alan Heeger
The son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, he helped show that plastic can carry electricity, opening the way to flexible electronics.
Medicine · 2000
Eric Kandel
A child refugee from Nazi Vienna who used a sea snail to show how memories are stored as physical changes between nerve cells.
Refugee
Medicine · 2000
Paul Greengard
Showed how dopamine and other brain chemicals change nerve cells from the inside, guiding research on mental illness and drugs.
Physics · 2000
Zhores Alferov
Soviet physicist who pioneered the layered semiconductor crystals behind the lasers that carry internet data through glass fibres.
Economics · 2001
George A. Akerlof
Showed how hidden information can wreck a market, explaining why buyers fear lemons and why warranties, brands and fair rules matter.
Economics · 2001
Joseph E. Stiglitz
He showed how hidden information bends markets for loans, jobs and insurance, and argued that governments must help repair the damage.
Economics · 2002
Daniel Kahneman
He showed that human judgment goes wrong in predictable ways, reshaping economics and how governments help people save.
Refugee
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Medicine · 2002
H. Robert Horvitz
Found the genes that tell cells when to die, a worm discovery that changed how we understand cancer and brain disease.
Literature · 2002
Imre Kertész
Deported to Auschwitz at 14, he wrote Fatelessness, a novel showing how ordinary people are swallowed by history.
Medicine · 2002
Sydney Brenner
A cobbler's son who helped crack how genes make proteins, then turned a tiny worm into a window on how animals are built.
Physics · 2003
Alexei Abrikosov
He showed how magnetic fields thread through superconductors in tiny whirlpools, the physics that explains today's MRI magnets.
Physics · 2003
Vitaly L. Ginzburg
Co-wrote the theory of superconductors that explains the magnets inside MRI scanners, despite Stalin-era attacks on him as a Jew.
Chemistry · 2004
Aaron Ciechanover
He helped discover how cells tag unwanted proteins for destruction, knowledge that led to new drugs for a deadly blood cancer.
Chemistry · 2004
Avram Hershko
A child survivor of the Holocaust, he helped discover how cells tag unwanted proteins for destruction, work behind new cancer drugs.
Physics · 2004
David J. Gross
Showed why quarks are locked inside every proton and neutron, completing our theory of the force that holds matter together.
Literature · 2004
Elfriede Jelinek
An Austrian writer who turned everyday clichés inside out to expose sexism, violence and her country's buried Nazi past.
Physics · 2004
H. David Politzer
As a 23-year-old graduate student, he independently found the minus sign that explained how quarks behave inside protons and neutrons.
Chemistry · 2004
Irwin Rose
A Brooklyn-born enzyme chemist whose lab hosted the discovery of how cells tag unwanted proteins for destruction.
Medicine · 2004
Richard Axel
A Brooklyn tailor's son who found the huge gene family behind the sense of smell, and helped turn cells into factories for medicines.
Literature · 2005
Harold Pinter
A tailor's son from Hackney whose plays showed the menace hidden in everyday talk, and who spoke out against torture and war.
Economics · 2005
Robert J. Aumann
A boy who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 grew up to prove, in mathematics, why long-term relationships make cooperation possible.
Refugee
Physics · 2005
Roy J. Glauber
He wrote the quantum theory of light behind today's photon counters, quantum cryptography and the young field of quantum optics.
Medicine · 2006
Andrew Z. Fire
He found that double-stranded RNA can switch off one chosen gene, a tool now used across biology and in new medicines.
Chemistry · 2006
Roger D. Kornberg
He made the first atom-by-atom pictures of the machine cells use to read their genes, showing how DNA's silent code comes to life.
Economics · 2007
Eric S. Maskin
He showed when rules can be designed so that people acting in their own interest still reach the goals a society wants.
Economics · 2007
Leonid Hurwicz
A Jewish refugee with no economics degree, he showed how to design rules that make honesty pay, from auctions to regulation.
Refugee
Economics · 2007
Roger B. Myerson
He showed how to write rules that make honesty pay, laying foundations for modern auctions, regulation and fairer institutions.
Chemistry · 2008
Martin Chalfie
He got a jellyfish's green glow working inside other creatures, so scientists could watch genes and cells at work in living things.
Economics · 2008
Paul Krugman
He explained why similar countries trade similar goods and why cities keep growing, changing how we understand globalization.
Chemistry · 2009
Ada E. Yonath
She spent two decades mapping the cell's protein factory atom by atom, then showed where antibiotics grip it.
Economics · 2009
Elinor Ostrom
She showed that communities can share forests, fisheries and water without ruining them, and was the first woman to win the economics prize.
Economics · 2010
Peter A. Diamond
He explained why jobless people and unfilled jobs exist side by side, and spent decades advising on how to keep Social Security sound.
Physics · 2011
Adam G. Riess
He helped discover that the universe's expansion is speeding up, revealing that most of the cosmos is a mysterious dark energy.
Medicine · 2011
Bruce A. Beutler
He found how our cells sense a key bacterial molecule, and his lab invented the TNF-blocking design behind the arthritis drug Enbrel.
Chemistry · 2011
Dan Shechtman
He saw atoms in an 'impossible' pattern, stood firm through years of ridicule, and changed what science calls a crystal.
Medicine · 2011
Ralph M. Steinman
He discovered dendritic cells, the scouts that switch on our immune defences, changing how vaccines and immunotherapies are designed.
Physics · 2011
Saul Perlmutter
He tracked exploding stars billions of light-years away and found that the universe's expansion is speeding up, not slowing down.
Economics · 2012
Alvin E. Roth
He turned matching theory into working systems that place doctors in residencies, students in schools and kidneys in patients.
Chemistry · 2012
Robert J. Lefkowitz
He helped prove that the cell's hormone 'receivers' are real molecules and revealed the receptor family a third of all drugs act on.
Physics · 2012
Serge Haroche
He trapped light in a box of mirrors and counted its photons without destroying them, turning quantum thought experiments into real ones.
Chemistry · 2013
Arieh Warshel
Kibbutz-born chemist who taught computers to model how enzymes work by joining quantum and classical physics.
Physics · 2013
François Englert
A Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis in Belgium who grew up to explain how the universe's basic particles get their mass.
Refugee
Medicine · 2013
James E. Rothman
He showed how protein 'zippers' let tiny bubbles inside our cells deliver insulin, nerve signals and other cargo to the right place.
Chemistry · 2013
Martin Karplus
Refugee from Nazi Vienna who taught computers to show atoms moving inside proteins, making simulation a core tool of biology.
Refugee
Chemistry · 2013
Michael Levitt
South African-born biophysicist who helped turn the computer into a chemistry lab, simulating how proteins fold, move and work.
Medicine · 2013
Randy W. Schekman
Using baker's yeast, he found the genes cells use to ship proteins out, work that later helped companies use yeast to make insulin.
Literature · 2014
Patrick Modiano
A French novelist who used old files, addresses and phone books to give names back to people erased in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Literature · 2016
Bob Dylan
A grandson of Jewish immigrants who fused folk, blues and poetry into songs that movements marched to and critics read as literature.
Physics · 2016
J. Michael Kosterlitz
Son of a refugee from Nazi Berlin, he used topology to explain how ultra-thin films change state, opening a new field of physics.
Economics · 2016
Oliver Hart
He showed why ownership matters when contracts can't foresee everything, shaping how firms, loans and public services are designed.
Physics · 2017
Barry C. Barish
He rescued a struggling gravitational-wave project and built it into the observatory that first detected black holes colliding.
Medicine · 2017
Michael Rosbash
The son of refugees from Nazi Germany, he helped show how genes in our cells build the 24-hour clock that times sleep and waking.
Physics · 2017
Rainer Weiss
A refugee from Nazi Berlin, he designed the laser detector that first heard gravitational waves from colliding black holes.
Refugee
Economics · 2017
Richard H. Thaler
He showed that people are predictably human with money, then helped turn that insight into plans that got millions more workers saving.
Physics · 2018
Arthur Ashkin
He turned laser light into tweezers that can hold a living cell or a single molecule without touching it.
Economics · 2018
William D. Nordhaus
He built the first models linking the economy to the climate, giving governments a way to put a price on carbon pollution.
Economics · 2019
Michael Kremer
He brought randomized trials into the fight against poverty, testing what really helps poor children learn, stay healthy and survive.
Physics · 2020
Andrea Ghez
She tracked stars racing around the Milky Way's center and helped show that a black hole of four million suns sits there.
Medicine · 2020
Harvey J. Alter
He tracked a hidden virus through donated blood, helping make transfusions safe from hepatitis C and opening the way to a cure.
Literature · 2020
Louise Glück
A poet who turned grief, family pain and ancient myth into spare, plain-spoken poems that speak to readers one at a time.
Economics · 2020
Paul R. Milgrom
He co-designed the auctions governments use to sell airwaves, raising billions for the public and putting spectrum to work for phone users.
Physics · 2020
Roger Penrose
He proved that Einstein's theory predicts black holes will form, turning a mathematical oddity into something astronomers set out to find.
Disputed inclusion
Medicine · 2021
David Julius
A Brooklyn grandson of Jewish immigrants who used chili peppers to find the nerve sensor that feels burning heat and pain.
Economics · 2021
Joshua D. Angrist
He showed how lotteries and accidents of policy can reveal cause and effect, giving schools and governments evidence they can trust.
Economics · 2022
Ben Bernanke
He showed how bank collapses turned the 1930s slump into the Great Depression, then used that lesson to fight the 2008 crisis.
Economics · 2022
Douglas Diamond
He explained why banks exist and why fear alone can topple a healthy bank, giving deposit insurance a clear theoretical rationale.
Economics · 2023
Claudia Goldin
She dug 200 years of hidden women's work out of the archives and showed why women still earn less than men.
Medicine · 2023
Drew Weissman
With Katalin Karikó, he kept lab-made mRNA from setting off the immune alarm, a key step behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
Chemistry · 2024
David Baker
Turned the computer into a workshop for building proteins that never existed in nature, aimed at disease, pollution and energy.
Medicine · 2024
Gary Ruvkun
He helped discover microRNAs, tiny RNA switches that fine-tune our genes, and showed that humans share them with worms.
Economics · 2025
Joel Mokyr
Economic historian who showed how science and skilled hands, working together, turned short bursts of invention into lasting prosperity.
Literature · 2025
László Krasznahorkai
Hungarian novelist whose long, dark and funny sentences stare into collapse and terror yet insist that art still matters.
Physics · 2025
Michel H. Devoret
Showed that an electric circuit you can hold obeys quantum rules, then spent 40 years turning such circuits into qubits.
Economics · 2025
Philippe Aghion
With Peter Howitt, he modeled creative destruction, showing how new ideas replacing old ones keep lifting living standards.