Muslim Scientist Aziz Sancar

Aziz Sancar

Turkish-born scientist Aziz Sancar, a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, deserves to be the person of the year in Turkey.

Aziz Sancar, aged 69, holds US and Turkish citizenship. Aziz Sancar, MD PhD is Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He was born in Savur-Mardin, a district in Turkey's southeastern province of Mardin and grew up in a family of farmers with eight children in 1946.

He obtained his primary and secondary education in Savur and Mardin, and then received an M.D. degree in 1969 from the Istanbul University School of Medicine. After studying medicine in İstanbul, Sancar left Turkey for the.

He became a doctor in a small region in Turkey for two years and then he went to United States in 1973 and then he got his Ph.D. in the field of molecular biology at the University of Texas at Dallas in 1977 with his work on DNA repair and then worked on a research project at Yale University in the field of DNA repair, which was the beginning of his journey to winning the Nobel Prize.

Aziz Sancar lives in Chapel Hill with his wife Gwen Sancar, also a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Sancar is now the second Turk to have won a Nobel prize, with the first being novelist Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

Sancar: My family attached great importance to education

Speaking to Habertürk TV after it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize on Oct. 7, Sancar said he comes from a family of farmers who attached great importance to education. His mother and father did not receive an education, but all eight children became university graduates.

Abdulğani Sancar, a cousin in Savur, told Today's Zaman on Oct. 7 that all of his relatives are very proud of the success of Professor Sancar. “My cousin is a very good person. He provides scholarships to many children in Savur. He talks with the school principals and provide scholarships to students in need,

Sancar also announced that he is going to spend the prize of 8 million Swedish krona ($969,000) that he has received from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his contribution to science on the Türk Evi project. Türk Evi (Turkish House), owned by the Aziz and Gwen Sancar Foundation, is a hostel with private rooms for rent to Turkish students and students interested in Turkish culture in Chapel Hill. Sancar also said that the purpose of the organization, which was established by Sancar and his wife in 2007, is to establish a Turkish student center (Carolina Turkish House) in close proximity to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus.