DNA replication, repair, and metabolism

Aidan J. Doherty

Aidan J. Doherty (A.J. Doherty) is a biochemist and structural biologist, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Sussex since 2009, known for identifying bacterial NHEJ DNA repair.

Arthur Kornberg

Arthur Kornberg (1918–2007) was an American biochemist who discovered DNA polymerase, first synthesized DNA in a test tube, and shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Aziz Sancar (born 1946, Savur, Turkey), Turkish-American biochemist at UNC Chapel Hill; 2015 Nobel Chemistry laureate (1/3, with Lindahl and Modrich) for mechanistic studies of DNA repair, including ABC excinuclease dual incisions and human nucleotide excision repair.

Brandt F. Eichman

Brandt F. Eichman is an American structural biologist at Vanderbilt University known for discovering that the DNA repair enzyme AlkD excises damaged bases without base flipping.

Bret Freudenthal

Bret Freudenthal is an American structural biologist and biochemist, a professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center known for structural studies of DNA base excision repair.

Charles S. McHenry

Charles S. McHenry is an American biochemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, known for working out the enzymology of bacterial DNA replication.

Claude Hélène

Claude Hélène, also known as Claude Helene, was a French biophysicist and biochemist who directed the Centre de biophysique moléculaire in Orléans and pioneered antisense and antigene oligonucleotide strategies.

Danzhou Yang

Danzhou Yang is a medicinal chemist and Distinguished Professor at Purdue University who studies G-quadruplex DNA structures in oncogene promoters and telomeres by NMR spectroscopy.

David Cortez

David Cortez is an American molecular biologist who studies how cells protect and repair DNA during replication, and chairs the Department of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

David M.J. Lilley

David M.J. Lilley (born 1948) is a British biochemist at the University of Dundee known for his work on branched nucleic acids, especially the Holliday junction.

Oct 10, 2026

David Pettijohn

David Pettijohn is an American biophysicist who co-discovered DNA repair replication with Philip Hanawalt at Stanford in 1964, work the Nobel Committee credits as an early step toward nucleotide excision repair.

Dipankar Sen

Dipankar Sen is an Indian-born biochemist at Simon Fraser University since 1991, known for early Nature papers on four-stranded G4-DNA and for showing that DNA can act as a catalyst.

Eric C. Greene

Eric C. Greene is a biochemist and professor at Columbia University who studies genome integrity and homologous DNA recombination, and pioneered the DNA curtains single-molecule imaging platform.

Oct 10, 2026

Erling Seeberg

Erling Christen Seeberg (1946–2004) was a biochemist whose 1970s work showed that three uvr gene products cut ultraviolet-damaged DNA in E. coli, cited in the 2015 Nobel Prize background.

Erwin Chargaff

Erwin Chargaff (1905–2002) was an Austro-Hungarian-born American biochemist at Columbia University whose Chargaff's rules on DNA base composition helped lay the groundwork for the double-helix model.

I. Robert Lehman

I. Robert Lehman (Israel Robert Lehman) was an American biochemist who spent fifty years at Stanford studying DNA enzymes, co-discovering DNA polymerase I and characterizing DNA ligase.

Jack D. Griffith

Jack D. Griffith, born 1942, is an American biochemist and molecular biologist at UNC Chapel Hill who pioneered electron microscopy of DNA-protein complexes and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

James C. Wang

James C. Wang, born 1936, is a Taiwanese-American biochemist and Harvard professor emeritus who discovered the first DNA topoisomerase, coined the word "topoisomerase", and studied DNA topology for 40 years.

James M. Berger

James M. Berger is an American structural biologist and biochemist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, known for determining the structures of type II DNA topoisomerases and helicases.

Jerard Hurwitz

Jerard Hurwitz (1928–2019) was an American biochemist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who co-discovered DNA-dependent RNA polymerase in 1960 and polynucleotide kinase, DNA ligase, and RNA ligase.

Jerome Vinograd

Jerome Vinograd (1913–1976) was an American biophysical chemist at Caltech, called by The New York Times one of the foremost DNA researchers, known for density gradient ultracentrifugation and closed circular DNA.

Johannes C. Walter

Johannes C. Walter, also known as Johannes Walter, is an American biochemist and HHMI investigator at Harvard Medical School who studies how vertebrate cells replicate and repair DNA.

John A. Tainer

John A. Tainer is an American structural biologist who determines atomic structures of DNA repair proteins, work linking mutations in those machines to cancer, at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Keith R. Fox

Keith R. Fox is a British biochemist who spent his career at the University of Southampton, studying DNA sequence recognition, triple helices, and G-quadruplex structures.

Malcolm F. White

Malcolm F. White is a biochemist and Professor of Biochemistry at the University of St Andrews, known for research on CRISPR antiviral defense and DNA repair.

Maria Spies

Maria Spies is a biophysicist and professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Iowa, known for single-molecule dissection of DNA repair machines and for her HHMI Early Career Scientist Award.

Mark D. Szczelkun

Mark D. Szczelkun is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Bristol who studies bacterial defense enzymes, including restriction-modification motors and CRISPR-Cas, at the single-molecule level.

Martin Egli

Martin Egli is a Swiss structural biologist and Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University since 2005, known for crystallographic studies of nucleic acids and antisense therapeutics.

Mike O’Donnell

Mike O'Donnell is an American biochemist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Rockefeller University known for discovering that sliding clamp proteins encircle DNA during replication.