Ada Yonath

Ada Yonath was born in 1939 in Jerusalem

Ada Lifshitz was born in 1939 in the Geula quarter of Jerusalem. Her parents came from Poland in 1933 and ran a grocery store, and her father was a rabbi. After his death the family moved to Tel Aviv, where she finished high school at Tichon Hadash while teaching math to help pay her way.

After her military service she studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1962 and a master's degree in biochemistry in 1964. In 1968 she received her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science for X-ray studies of collagen.

After postdoctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, she returned to the Weizmann Institute in 1970. There she set up the first protein crystallography laboratory in Israel. She also worked with the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and headed a Max Planck research unit in Hamburg from 1986 to 2004.

Her work mapped the structure of the ribosome and showed how many antibiotics act on it. She helped develop cryo bio-crystallography, which became a standard method. In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and became the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize.

She was married to Moshe Yonath, and they later divorced. They had one daughter, Hagit. Ada Yonath died in 2026.