Two Columbia Graduates Win Nobel Prizes

Dr. Robert J. Lefkowitz, a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, has won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And Alvin E. Roth, a Columbia Engineering alumni, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Lefkowitz will share the $1.2 million prize with Dr. Brian K. Kobilka of Stanford University School of Medicine. They were honored for their discovery of cell receptors that react to hormones and neurotransmitters, which led to major advances in pharmaceutical research.

A 1962 graduate of the College, Lefkowitz earned his M.D. from Columbia’s medical school in 1966. He also completed his internship and one year of general medical residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (now Columbia University Medical Center), and currently serves on the medical school’s board of visitors. He is also the second graduate of that 1966 P&S class to win a Nobel. Harold Varmus, M.D, director of the National Cancer Institute, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1989.

Lefkowitz (CC’62, P&S’66) is currently a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

Roth (SEAS'71) was honored for his pioneering work in the practical design of market institutions. He shares the award—officially named the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences—with economist Lloyd S. Shapley, professor emeritus at University of California-Los Angeles, who also used game theory to better understand different matching methods.

After receiving his B.S. from the Engineering School in 1971, Roth moved to California to complete his master’s and doctorate at Stanford University, both in operations research, in 1973 and 1974, respectively. He began his academic career as a professor in the departments of business administration and economics at the University of Illinois. From 1982 to 1998, he was the A.W. Mellon Professor of Economics and also a professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh. He joined Harvard in 1998 and is also a visiting professor of Economics at Stanford where he will join the faculty full-time in 2013. Roth has received numerous professional honors and awards in recognition of his research including a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and was elected a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Roth is currently the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard.

Roth and Lefkowitz's prizes bring the number of Columbian Nobel laureates to 82.