Jeffrey C. Hall

Facts

Jeffrey C. Hall

© Nobel Media AB. Photo: A. Mahmoud

Jeffrey C. Hall
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017

Born: 3 May 1945, New York, NY, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Maine, Maine, ME, USA

Prize motivation: “for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm”

Prize share: 1/3

Life

Jeffrey Hall was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up outside of Washington, DC. After studies at Amherst College, he went on to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned his doctor’s degree in 1971. After a stay at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he began work in 1974 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Work

In our cells an internal clock helps us to adapt our biological rhythm to the different phases of day and night. Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young studied fruit flies to figure out how this clock works. In 1984 they managed to identify a gene that encodes a protein that accumulates during the night but is degraded during the day. They also identified additional proteins that form part of a self-regulating biological clockwork in the fruit fly's cells. The same principles have been shown to apply to other animals and plants.

To cite this section
MLA style: Jeffrey C. Hall – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Fri. 22 Sep 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2017/hall/facts/>

Back to top Back To Top Takes users back to the top of the page

Coming up

This year’s Nobel Prize announcements will take place 2–9 October. All announcements will be streamed live here on nobelprize.org.

See the full schedule
Announcement dates

Explore prizes and laureates

Look for popular awards and laureates in different fields, and discover the history of the Nobel Prize.