Who

The Nobel Prize winning scientist is the president of Rockefeller University, the highly respected biomedical research center on the Upper East Side.

Backstory

The son of a chauffeur and a house cleaner, British-born Nurse initially didn't go to college because he lacked the basic foreign language qualifications needed to enroll. Instead, he worked as a technician at a Guinness beer factory until a genetics professor at a nearby university noticed his application and helped him bypass the language requirement. Nurse took an interest in zoology and cell cycles as an undergrad before enrolling in a PhD program in genetics. He focused his research on fission yeast (which plays an important role in cancer research) during the '70s and '80s, and by the time he joined Oxford as chair of the department of microbiology in 1988, he'd already become an internationally recognized expert on the subject. He went on to become director of research at the Cancer Research Fund, the largest volunteer-sustained cancer research organization in the world, before sharing the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his work on "molecular mechanisms that regulate the cell cycle and the process by which a cell copies its genetic material and divides into two cells." He was tapped for his current position as president of Rockefeller University in 2003.

Of note

In addition to serving as president of Rockefeller—the university founded by John Rockefeller after his grandson died of scarlet fever in 1901—Nurse teaches in the school's Laboratory of Yeast Genetics and Cell Biology. He's also a skilled fundraiser for the Upper East Side institution, which operates with a $230 million annual budget. Together with Harold Varmus of Memorial Sloan-Kettering and Tony Gotto of Weill Cornell, Nurse landed a $50 million donation to fund stem cell research from Hank Greenberg's Starr Foundation in 2006. The three are also collaborating on a chemical and computational biology graduate program that involves the faculty from each of their respective institutions.

Trophy case

Prior to receiving the Nobel Prize, Nurse won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1998—a frequent precursor to winning a Nobel—and was knighted by the Queen a year later. (Nurse's father, who abandoned school at 12, wept at the occasion.) In 2002, he was awarded France's Legion d'Honneur.

Personal

Nurse—who has a motorcycle and a pilot's license—has been married to his wife Anne, a teacher, since 1971. They have two adult daughters, Sarah and Emily, and live on the Upper East Side.

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