Carl Woese
| Carl Woese | |
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Woese in 2004
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| Born | Carl Richard Woese July 15, 1928 Syracuse, New York, U.S. |
| Died | December 30, 2012 (aged 84) Urbana, Illinois, U.S. |
| Residence | Urbana, Illinois, U.S. |
| Citizenship | American |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Microbiology |
| Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Physical Studies on Animal viruses (1953) |
| Doctoral advisor | Ernest C. Pollard |
| Notable students | David Stahl |
| Known for | Archaea |
| Notable awards |
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Carl Richard Woese (/ˈwoʊz/; July 15, 1928 – December 30, 2012) was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea (a new domain or kingdom of life) in 1977 by phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique pioneered by Woese which revolutionized the discipline of microbiology. He was also the originator of the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. He held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Woese attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Amherst College in 1950. During his time at Amherst, Woese took only one biology course (Biochemistry, in his senior year) and had "no scientific interest in plants and animals" until advised by William M. Fairbank, then an assistant professor of physics at Amherst, to pursue biophysics at Yale.
In 1953, he completed a Ph.D. in biophysics at Yale University, where his doctoral research focused on the inactivation of viruses by heat and ionizing radiation. He studied medicine at the University of Rochester for two years, quitting two days into a pediatrics rotation. Then he became a postdoctoral researcher in biophysics at Yale University investigating bacterial spores. From 1960–63, he worked as a biophysicist at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. In 1964, Woese joined the microbiology faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he focused on Archaea, genomics, and molecular evolution as his areas of expertise. He became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, which was renamed in his honor in 2015, after his death.
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