For more than a decade, Arizona State University President Michael Crow has strived to create an institution of academic excellence with a world-class research reputation. Now, he has a quartet of Nobel Prize winners on the faculty to help him inch closer to that goal.
In May, the university announced that Sidney Altman, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, would join the School of Life Sciences; and Frank Wilczek, recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, would become a professor in the Department of Physics. The two highly esteemed scientists join current ASU professors Leland Hartwell, 2001 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine; and Edward Prescott, 2004 Nobel Prize winner in Economics. “It is a unique honor to play host to four Nobel laureates at ASU,” Crow says. “The university says ‘yes’ to ideas, and that leads to an environment where anything is possible. In turn, that helps attract some of the brightest minds to choose to advance their fields here.”
Meet the prize-winning minds advancing ASU’s academic mission:
Sidney Altman
Altman shares his Nobel Prize with Thomas R. Cech, for their discoveries, made independently, that ribonucleic acid actively aids chemical reactions in cells. Altman first came to ASU several years ago as a visiting professor with the Origins Project, a program that brings the world’s most distinguished scholars and public intellectuals to ASU. The project’s director, Lawrence Krauss, is Altman’s former colleague at Yale University. Altman maintains a research relationship with Yale.
Last winter, Altman returned to Tempe to teach a six-week advanced seminar on non-coding RNA to undergraduates and graduate students, which required them to read the latest research papers and be able to answer Altman’s questions. “We covered a lot of ground and I enjoyed the intellectual experience,” he says. Altman plans on teaching the course again in the spring and looks forward to participating in ASU’s “welcoming atmosphere.”
Ed Prescott
A Regents’ Professor in the W.P Carey School of Business since 2003, Prescott shares the Nobel Prize with Finn Kydland for two papers they co-authored on dynamic macroeconomics. Since joining the faculty and subsequently receiving the Nobel in 2004, Prescott says he’s enjoyed a great deal of progress in his research. For Prescott, who is also senior monetary adviser for Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, one of the perks of teaching at ASU is participating in what he terms a “culture of collaboration,” especially within the economics department. Prescott modestly remarks that winning the Nobel Prize “wasn’t a big deal… what is a big deal is whether or not the new generation is building on your tools and techniques to study economic phenomena.”
Prescott calls the new generation of ASU students he works with “the best of the best. Some of our students know a lot more about economics than people in Washington.”
Leland Hartwell
In 2001, Hartwell was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Tim Hunt and Sir Paul M. Nurse for their discovery of key regulators of the cell cycle. Due to “good fortune,” Hartwell met Crow while vacationing in the Galapagos Islands. After the trip, the two stayed in touch, resulting in an invitation for Hartwell to come to ASU in 2009. Currently serving as ASU’s Virginia G. Piper Chair of Personalized Medicine, Hartwell is also chief scientist of the Center for Sustainable Health in the Biodesign Institute. Being one of four Nobel winners on ASU’s faculty doesn’t faze Hartwell. What does impress him are the challenges that Crow is tackling – “to be broadly equitable and provide an education for as many students as possible at a reasonable cost and at the same time try to be a high-powered research institution. I think we’re doing pretty well. The quality of the research faculty is terrific,” Hartwell says.
Frank Wilczek
Theoretical physicist and MIT professor Wilczek shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and H. David Politzer for their collective discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction, meaning that the strong force between quarks – components of protons – becomes weaker at smaller distances and stronger as they move apart. Also introduced to ASU by Lawrence Krauss as visiting faculty for the Origins Project, Wilczek sees ASU as a dynamic place with an interactive transdisciplinary atmosphere where he has opportunities to engage with faculty and students beyond his own discipline. In the spring, Wilczek will teach a seminar about ongoing work in advanced physics and is considering teaching a brief course for undergraduates on the physics of perception. Wilczek has had the chance to interact with some of ASU’s “outstanding students as well as others who might not have as much preparation, but are ambitious and want to do well.” He anticipates working with them as well as graduates and post-doctoral students. “Hopefully my presence and the other activities at ASU will attract the very best students.”
Harvard University: 157
Columbia University: 104
University of Chicago: 91
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 85
University of California, Berkeley: 72
*total numbers include graduates, researchers and staff
