CAMBRIDGE, MA. — May 17, 2006 — Nobel laureate H. Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of Cancer Biology, is MIT's James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award winner for 2005-2006.

Deborah Halber, News Office Correspondent
May 23, 2006

Erich P. Ippen, the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and a professor of physics, announced the Killian Award committee's decision at the faculty meeting on Wednesday, May 17.

Established in 1971 as a tribute to MIT's 10th president, the Killian Award recognizes extraordinary professional accomplishment by an MIT faculty member. The winner is asked to deliver a lecture in the spring term. Horvitz shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering and characterizing the genes controlling cell death in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a microscopic roundworm. Horvitz is an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and for the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and he is a member of the MIT Center for Cancer Research. He also holds appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital in neurology and in medicine.

"Bob is a pioneer in using the simple roundworm as an experimental organism for seminal discoveries in cell differentiation and cell death that have increased our fundamental understanding of all multicellular organisms," Ippen said. "In his 27-year tenure on the faculty, Bob has taught thousands of students the fundamentals of genetics, he has been a mentor to graduate students and postdocs, many of whom are now top-rated faculty around the country. It's an honor for me to present this award to someone so devoted not only to research but also to teaching and service to the entire Institute." "It's been a great place to be for a long time," Horvitz said as he thanked the committee and the faculty members applauding him.