Jacques Dubochet

Jacques Dubochet (born 8 June 1942) is a retired Swiss biophysicist. He is a former researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and an honorary professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

In 2017, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution". He received the Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal, alongside his colleagues Professor Joachim Frank and Dr Richard Henderson, in 2018 for 'an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense'.

Career

Dubochet started to study physics at the École polytechnique de l'Université de Lausanne (now École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) in 1962 and obtained his degree in physical engineering in 1967. He obtained a Certificate of Molecular Biology at University of Geneva in 1969 and then began to study electron microscopy of DNA. In 1973, he completed his thesis in biophysics at University of Geneva and University of Basel.

From 1978 to 1987, Dubochet was group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, then part of West Germany. From 1987 to 2007, he was professor at the University of Lausanne. In 2007, at 65 years old, he retired and became an honorary professor at the University of Lausanne.

During his career, Dubochet developed technologies in cryo-electron microscopy, cryo-electron tomography and cryo-electron microscopy of vitreous sections.