Martin Lee Chalfie was born on January 15, 1947. He is a professor at Columbia University. In 2008, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien for their work on the green fluorescent protein, GFP. He earned a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard University.

Early life and education

Chalfie was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Eli Chalfie, a guitarist who lived from 1910 to 1996, and Vivian Chalfie, who owned an apparel store and was born in 1913 and died in 2005. His maternal grandfather, Meyer L. Friedlen, moved to Chicago from Moscow when he was young. His paternal grandparents, Benjamin and Esther Chalfie, traveled from Brest-Litovsk to Cincinnati and were Jewish.

He enrolled at Harvard University in 1965, planning to study math. However, he changed his major to biochemistry because it connected his interests in chemistry, math, and biology. During the summer after his junior year, he worked in the laboratory of Klaus Weber at Harvard. He said, "It was so discouraging to fail completely that I decided I should not be in biology." Because of this, during his senior year, he finished his major and took classes in law, theater, and Russian literature.

He also swam for the Harvard team and was named captain in his senior year. At that time, swimming coach Bill Brooks said, "Marty will make an excellent captain because he is respected by everyone on the team." As captain, he received the Harold S. Ulen trophy, which is given to a senior on the Harvard team who shows the best qualities of leadership, sportsmanship, and teamwork. Later, when Chalfie won the Nobel Prize, his freshman-year roommate noted, "He always introduced himself as a swimmer."

After graduating in 1969, he held several temporary jobs, such as helping sell dresses made by his parents' business in Chicago and teaching at Hamden Hall Country Day School in Hamden, Connecticut. In the summer of 1971, his research at the laboratory of Jose Zadunaisky at Yale University led to his first published work. With renewed confidence, he returned to Harvard for graduate studies under Robert Perlman and earned his PhD in 1977.

Career and research

Chalfie completed his postdoctoral work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston. In 1985, he and the two scientists published a paper titled "The Neural Circuit for Touch Sensitivity in C. elegans." In 1982, Chalfie left the LMB to become a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. He continued his research on C. elegans touch mutants during this time.

He married Tulle Hazelrigg. Later, she joined him as a faculty member at Columbia University. She allowed him to include her unpublished research in his important Science paper titled "Green Fluorescent Protein as a Marker for Gene Expression," on the condition that he made coffee, cooked meals, and cleaned the garbage every night for a month.

Chalfie and his wife had a daughter named Sarah in July 1992.

In 2004, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

He missed a phone call from the Nobel Prize Committee while sleeping. When he woke up, he assumed the prize had already been announced. He joked, "Okay, who's the schnook that got the Prize this time?" He then checked the Nobel Prize website on his laptop and discovered that he was the schnook.

In 2015, Chalfie signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change during the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. The declaration was signed by 76 Nobel Laureates and given to then-President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the COP21 climate summit in Paris.

Chalfie’s lab uses the nematode C. elegans to study nerve cell development and function. The detailed information about C. elegans’s development, anatomy, genetics, and molecular structure makes it a widely studied model organism for these research areas.

He has published more than 100 papers, with at least 25 of them cited more than 100 times.

Chalfie’s work on green fluorescent protein began after attending a 1988 seminar by Paul Brehm about bioluminescent organisms. This led to important experiments in 1992, described in his paper "Green Fluorescent Protein as a Marker for Gene Expression." This paper is among the 20 most-cited papers in Molecular Biology & Genetics. He received a Golden Goose Award for this work in 2012.

In 2023, he was awarded an honorary degree in physics by the University of Parma on July 4.

Awards and honours

• 2003: Selected to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2004: Selected to join the National Academy of Sciences
• 2006: Received the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Outstanding Research in Medical Science, Brandeis University (shared with Roger Y. Tsien)
• 2007: Named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• 2008: Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien) for discovering and developing green fluorescent protein (GFP)
• 2008: Received the E. B. Wilson Medal, American Society for Cell Biology (shared with Roger Y. Tsien)
• 2009: Selected to join the Institute of Medicine
• 2012: Received the Golden Goose Award
• 2023: Honored with an honorary degree in physics, University of Parma