WIKIMEDIA, ZERO GREY

Nobel fever is in the air again. As the world awaits the news from Stockholm in October, scientific publisher Thomson Reuters has released its list of "Citation Laureates," which highlights researchers whose work has been influential enough among their peers to make them contenders for science's most prestigious prize. Thomson Reuters generates the list using feedback from the scientific community combined with data from its Web of Knowledge, a system of tracking how often and by whom scientific papers are cited in the literature. Twenty-one Citation Laureates have gone on to actually win the Nobel Prize since Thomson Reuters began publishing the predictions in 2002.

"The more cited a scientist is, the more well-respected the author tends to be amongst his or her peers, which can be a predictor of awards like the Nobel Prize," said Thomson Reuters citation analyst David Pendlebury in a statement. "[Citation]...

Without further ado, here are this year's Citation Laureates in fields pertinent to the life sciences:

Chemistry

  • Allen J. Bard (University of Texas at Austin biochemist) "for the development and application of scanning electrochemical microscopy"
  • Martin Karplus (Harvard University chemist) "for pioneering simulations of the molecular dynamics of biomolecules"

Physiology or Medicine

  • Brian J. Druker (Oregon Health & Science University oncologist), Nicholas B. Lydon (founder of several biotech companies including Granite Biopharma, AnaptysBio, and Blueprint Medicines),and Charles L. Sawyers (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center oncologist) "for their development of imatinib and dasatinib, revolutionary, targeted treatments for chronic myeloid leukemia"
  • Robert S. Langer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemical engineer) and Joseph P. Vacanti (Harvard Medical School professor of surgery) "for their pioneering research in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine"
  • Jacques F. A. P. Miller (University of Melbourne researcher) "for his discovery of the function of the thymus and the identification of T cells and B cells in mammalian species"
  • Robert L. Coffman (vice president and chief scientific officer, Dynavax Technologies) and Timothy R. Mosmann (University of Rochester Medical Center immunologist) "for their discovery of two types of T lymphocytes, TH1 and TH2, and their role in regulating host immune response"

 

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