Who is Aziz Sancar, awarded the “Shohrat” Order by the President?

President Ilham Aliyev has awarded Aziz Sancar the “Shohrat” Order.

TodayPress TV reports that the President signed an order to this effect.

Aziz Sancar is a Turkish-American biochemist and molecular biologist who was born in 1946 in the Savur district of Mardin Province, Türkiye, into a middle-income farming family.

After graduating first in his class from Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine in 1969, he worked as a doctor for some time before earning a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Texas in the US and conducting postdoctoral research at Yale.

Since 1982, he has been a professor at the University of North Carolina, where he has worked on DNA repair, the cell cycle and biological clock mechanisms. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Tomas Lindahl and Paul Modrich for elucidating the mechanisms of DNA repair.

He donated his Nobel medal to Atatürk’s Anıtkabir mausoleum.

In 2021, he was awarded an honorary diploma by President Ilham Aliyev, elected an honorary member of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), and has visited Azerbaijan several times.

Together with his wife, he established a foundation in the US supporting Turkish students and has consistently emphasised his ties to the Turkic world.

Aziz Sancar has been married to biochemist Gwen Boles Sancar since 1978, and they have two goddaughters.

At the age of 79, he continues his scientific and academic work.

Jala Rovshan