Pioneer in synthetic biology receives ETH Honorary doctorate
On 16 November, ETH Zurich celebrated its 169th ETH Day. Upon the proposal of D-BSSE, Sven Panke, Head of the Department, presented this year’s ETH Honorary doctorate to Jason Chin, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Cambridge. By encoding non-canonical amino acids and rewriting entire chromosomes into proteins he reimagined the biochemistry of living systems.
Prof. Dr. Jason Chin
Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Recipient of the 2024 Honorary doctorate of ETH Zurich for his pioneering achievements in the expansion of the genetic code.
“With his work on expanding the number of proteinogenic amino acids and the rewriting of entire bacterial chromosomes Jason Chin showed us an elegant and powerful path towards enriching the biochemistry of Life in the future… We have seen a new version of the oldest rule of Life – a new, expanded Dogma of Molecular Biology.”Sven Panke, Head of D-BSSE, in his honorific speech
Chin studied chemistry at the University of Oxford, UK. He completed his PhD as a Fulbright Scholar at the Yale University, USA, with Alanna Schepartz, working on the evolution of ligands for apoptopic proteins. As a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Scripps Research Institute, he developed the first approaches to systematically expand the genetic code of eukaryotic cells and pioneered now widely used approaches to define protein interactions by genetically encoding photo-crosslinked amino acids. Since 2003, Chin held various positions at the MRC Cambridge, elaborating various methods to improve the use of new proteinogenic amino acids and more recently, rewriting bacterial chromosomes to facilitate the insertion of such amino acids. Applications of Chin's groundbreaking work range from fundamental biochemistry to biotechnology and developmental biology. Chin's work has been recognised with a number of awards: he is a recipient of the EMBO Gold Medal, a member of the European Inventors Hall of Fame, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Learn about research in the external page lab of Jason Chin.
Find the ETH News article on ETH Day 2024.
In recent years, D-BSSE nominated Prof. Dr. Stefan Hell (2018), Prof. Dr. Stephen R. Quake (2020) and Prof. Dr. Aviv Regev (2021) for the ETH Honorary doctorate.