Nobel Laureates at TU Dresden
Table of contents
Nobel Laureate speaker series 2022
After a two-year break, we are finally looking forward to getting a taste of Nobel Prize air in Dresden again.
Registration:
Please note: Unfortunately, the automatic response does not work for TUD mail accounts at the moment. If you have any questions regarding registration, please send an email to nicole.gierig@tu-dresden.de.For any questions concerning the registration, please write an email to
We would especially like to thank our sponsors for supporting the lecture series:
Novaled GmbH, Tecan, Hotel Taschenbergpalais Kempinski Dresden and Gesellschaft von Freunden und Förderern der TU Dresden.
Corona protection measures
There are no access restrictions. Neither vaccination nor test certificates are required. Nevertheless, we ask you to wear a face mask (preferably FFP2) indoors and if possible to keep the minimum distance of 1.5m.
Note on photos
During this event, photos will be taken. The photos will be used for internal and external public relations activities. By participating in the event, you consent to any photographs of you (that may be taken) being used for publications in print and online media, including social media.
Sir Andre Geim
Wednesday, June 08, 2022, 7 p.m.
Sir Andre Geim (UK; Nobel Prize in Physics 2010).
A Random Walk to Graphene
The discovery of graphene is truly one of the “eureka moments” of our time. It is the story of how Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov realized that the discarded strips of Scotch Tape routinely used to produce clean surfaces on blocks of graphite were not useless – but might actually be covered with a type of carbon only known in theory. A material consisting of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice and only one atom thick: graphene. In 2004 Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov successfully produced this material, graphene, and mapped its properties: incredibly thin but still incredibly strong, good heat and electrical conductivity, almost entirely transparent yet very dense. For their studies of this „wonder material“, the scientists were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics - only seven years after having described their initial discovery.
Sir Gregory Winter
Wednesday, June 22, 2022, 7 p.m.
Sir Gregory Winter (GB; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018).
Harnessing evolution to make new medicines
Evolution – the adaption of species to different environments – has created an enormous diversity of life. Gregory Winter has used the same principles – genetic change and selection – for the directed evolution of antibodies. Specifically, he used „phage display“, a method where a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria with its genes – is used to evolve new proteins. Today, this method can be used to develop targeted antibody therapies for specific diseases. Winter and his team used it to produce the first drug based entirely on an antibody in the 1990s, which was approved in 2002 as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. Since then, the method has been used to develop other antibody drugs for metastatic cancer, autoimmune diseases and toxins, among others. For the phage display of peptides and antibodies, Sir Gregory Winter, together with George P. Smith was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
All lectures are public, in English and take place in the Audimax of the Central lecture Hall at TU Dresden. Admission is free of charge.
Review: The Nobel Laureates at TU Dresden 2019
Ada Yonath
2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Wednesday, 24 April 2019, 7 pm: Ribosomes:
A Connection Between The Far Past & Near Future
Ada Yonath (* 22 June 1939 in Jerusalem)
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rechowot, Israel
Ribosomes, translation offices and protein factories in cells, have been the research focus of Ada Yonath (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel), the first “Nobel guest” at TU Dresden in 2019. Since the middle of the 20th century, it has been known that the molecular complex reads out genetic information from RNA and builds proteins based on this protein blueprint. Yet, the atomic masterpiece of how it does that had been a puzzle for scientists for a long time, its decryption was a mile stone in biochemical research for which the Isreali structural biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009, together with Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.
Born in 1939 under poor conditions in Jerusalem, Ada Yonath particularly remembers her curiosity to understand the principles of nature. After her father’s death – Yonath was only 11 years old –, she supported her family through several side jobs. Despite her conservative environment and traditional family values, her mother supported her daughter’s scholar ambitions. After her compulsory military service with the medical corps of the Israeli Army, Yonath studied chemistry, biochemistry and biophysics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She wrote her doctoral thesis at the Weizmann Institute of Science where, after an intermezzo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she established the first Israeli laboratory for biological crystallography – an important step towards her scientific merits of the crystallization and crystallography of ribosomes leading to the Nobel Prize. Today, Yonath is still working at the Weizmann Institute.
The first door to the ribosome machinery – its structure and working process – has been picked by Yonath in over two decades of research: through a detailed X-ray crystallography, a method outlining atomic and molecular structures. Beams of X-rays are diffracted inside the crystal, producing angles and intensities from which its composition can be computed. The crux in this had been the size of the ribosomes which was considered too complex to be crystallized – until Ada Yonath managed it by developing appropriate methods. In 1995, she succeeded in generating significant data by inserting markers into the ribosomes’ subunits. On 24th April at 7 p.m., the biologist will illuminate TU Dresden’s central lecture hall with this inspiration that made her manage the ribosome crystallization within the Max Planck Ribosome Structure Working Group. The knowledge on the cellular protein factories is used, amongst others, for the production of effective antibiotics that attack pathogens’ ribosomes.
Thomas Südhof
2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine
Friday, 26 April 2019, 6 pm:
How Synapses Are Made
Thomas Südhof (* 22 December 1955 in Göttingen)
Stanford University, California, USA
Synapses, the nervous system’s information distribution centers, are understood better by science thanks to the groundbreaking research of Thomas Südhof (Stanford University), Nobel Laureate in Medicine. At the synapses, nerve cells communicate: transferring, processing and changing information. These “nano computers” are based on difficile molecular processes that Südhof focused in his research.
Not only his parents, both physicians, but also his family’s preference for anthroposophy and Waldorf education shaped Thomas Südhof’s childhood. His grandmother acquainted him with Goethe and Kant and taught him the importance of education and the spirituality of values. Südhof was interested in almost all school subjects as well as classical music, and calls his bassoon teacher the most influential teacher of his school days. After leaving the Waldorf School Hannover, he decided to study medicine as, in his own words, he did not feel confident that he had sufficient talent to succeed in the difficult areas of music, philosophy or history. He got close to his future research field at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen where he was researching in neurochemistry as an assisting scientist, enjoying wide freedoms in his experiments and studies. After graduating from university, Südhof moved to Dallas, Texas, where as a postdoc he benefited from an optimistic and enthusiastic scientific culture – ending up to found a laboratory there in 1986 in which he went on doing his Nobel-honored research.
The biochemist was looking for the substances driving the molecular machinery of the synapses. He aimed to understand how and why the synaptic vesicles release the messenger substances they contain at the right point of time. Südhof found Calcium ions triggering chain reactions inside the cells, ending up in the vesicles setting free the neurotransmitters into the neighboring cell. Südhof found these processes and many of the proteins included by the synergy of various contemporary molecular biological and electrophysiological methods, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013 together with Randy W. Schekman and James E. Rothman. Medicine owes him a profound base for the research on diseases with failures in nerve cells, such as schizophrenia, depressions or diabetes. Since 2008, Südhof has been Professor for Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Neurology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. On 26th April at 6 p.m., Südhof will make the synapses in the TU Dresden’s central lecture hall glow.
Michael Kosterlitz
2016 Nobel Prize in Physics
Wednesday, 15 May 2019, 7 pm:
A Random Walk Through Physics to the Nobel Prize
Michael Kosterlitz (* 22 June 1943 in Aberdeen, UK)
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
The pioneering work of the 2016 Nobel Laureates in Physics, Michael Kosterlitz, David J. Thouless and F. Duncan M. Haldane kicked off the success story of topology applied to physical problems. This mathematical discipline plays an important role when it comes to characterizing new exotic materials, which made the Nobel committee award the physicists the Nobel Prize.
His father’s Jewish ancestry made Michael Kosterlitz’ family flee from Germany to Scotland where he was born in 1943. He attributes his talents in physics and mathematics to the necessity of compensating his unreliable memory. Due to his joy in chemical experiments, the school’s laboratory had to be evacuated more than once. In Cambridge, he studied physics, mathematics, chemistry and biochemistry, and discovered his passion for climbing which cost him quite a few hours of studies and academic successes. Despite his joy in the experimental discipline of chemistry, Kosterlitz chose – amongst others because of a red-green deficiency making problems in the chemical laboratory work – physics. After his doctoral degree in Oxford and an intermezzo in Italy, he applied for a job at the University of Birmingham where he met David Thouless – and the ideas about two-dimensional crystals, vortices and topology that led to his Nobel research.
Phase transitions make materials’ properties change drastically – for example the aggregate states, magnetic, electrical or elastic properties. These transitions are of special interest when it comes to surfaces or materials of few atomic layers. In these effectively two-dimensional systems, material properties fluctuate in an intensity that suppresses phase transitions. Michael Kosterlitz and David J. Thouless identified important exceptions: In certain cases, stable vortices form on the quantum level; a phase transition takes place when the interaction of these vortices changes significantly, as it does, amongst others, in superconductors, causing their electrical resistance to decrease. Topology makes it possible to calculate if such vortices can or cannot occur. This mathematical discipline describes the global properties of objects that remain unchanged even when the object is compressed, extended or distorted. Its application on physics could, as an example, make robust quantum computers be realized. Kosterlitz is now working as a Professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA. On 15th May at 7 p.m., he will electrify the TU Dresden’s Central Lecture Hall’s audience.
Takaaki Kajita
2015 Nobel Prize in Physics
Wednesday, 3 July 2019, 7 pm: Oscillating Neutrinos
Takaaki Kajita (* 9 March 1959 in Higashimatsuyama, Japan)
Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, Tokyo, Japan
Neutrinos, the „ghost particles“, had been considered massless for a long time. Takaaki Kajita (Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe) is, along with Arthur McDonald, one of the 2015 Nobel Laureates in Physics who have shown that they actually do have a mass. By this, the researcher revolutionized the idea of this particle that flows through matter almost without any interaction.
Takaaki Kajita grew up in the countryside in the north of Tokyo. His youth passion Kyudo, the Japanese archery sport which aims to realise truth, goodness and beauty within one bow shot, continued to play an important role in his academic life. Kajita studied physics at Saitama University, focussing early on experimental particle physics. On the advice of a fellow student, Kajita got involved with the Kamioka Nucleon Delay Experiment (Kamiokande): a Japanese pioneering experiment of nuclear physics in whose construction the future Nobel Laureate assisted – as he did in the construction of the experiment’s successor Super-Kamiokande where he worked on his prizewinning research.
In a zinc mine, 1,000 metres underground, Kajita traced the neutrinos in 50,000 tons of ultrapure water. Here, he analysed the particles caught in the tank – and found the ratio of the various kinds of neutrinos to diverge from calculations. His explanation: The muon neutrinos expected must have had turned into tau neutrinos that stayed invisible to the tank’s sensors; this transformation is known today as neutrino oscillation and only possible for particles that have a mass. The neutrino obviously having a mass, however small it is, queries the standard model of particle physics and opens up doors to find solutions for conflicts in physical theories. On 3rd July at 7 p.m., the Nobel Laureate will share ground-breaking and fascinating insights into our cosmos with the audience in the TU Dresden’s central lecture hall.
Review: Nobel Laureates at TU Dresden 2018
Klaus von Klitzing
1985 Nobel Prize in Physics
Wednesday, 11th April 2018, 7 p.m.:
Ein neues Kilogramm im nächsten Jahr und was das mit meinem Nobelpreis zu tun hat ("A New Kilogram Next Year and How My Nobel Prize is Concerned with This")
Bernard Lucas "Ben" Feringa
2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Wednesday, 18th April 2018, 7 p.m.:
The Art of Building Small
Serge Haroche
2012 Nobel Prize in Physics
Wednesday, 27th June 2018, 7 p.m.: Juggling with atoms and photons in a cavity: from fundamental tests to quantum metrology
Here you can find all information about the Nobel Laureates at TU Dresden 2018.
Review: Nobelpreisträger zu Gast an der TU Dresden 2016/2017
Nobel laureates visiting TU Dresden 2017
Arthur B. McDonald
Nobel Prize in Physics 2015
A Deeper Understanding of our Universe from 2km Underground
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1995
Die Streifen des Zebrafisches: Wozu und wie entsteht Schönheit bei Tieren?
Paul Modrich
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015
Mechanisms in DNA mismatch repair
Sir John B. Gurdon
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine 2012
Somatic cell nuclear transfer: memory of the past versus hope for the future
Here you can find all information about the 2017 Nobel laureate lecture series.
Nobel laureates visiting TU Dresden 2016
Here you can find all information about the 2016 Nobel laureate lecture series.