Date of appointment: 18 december 1984.
By proposal of: Faculty of Pharmacy, Faculty of Biological Sciences and Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry .
Date of investiture: 17 september 1985.
Sponsor: Dr. Rafael Santandreu Ramón and Dr. Eduardo Primo Yúfera.
Severo Ochoa de Albornoz was born in Luarca, Asturias, in 1905. Biochemist and molecular biologist.
He began his studies in Malaga, a city to which he moved with his family in 1912. He studied medicine and graduated in 1929 from the Complutense University of Madrid and did his doctorate shortly thereafter.
He works as an assistant professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and obtains several scholarships to further his studies at the universities of Glasgow, Berlin, London and Heidelberg, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research.
On his return to Madrid in 1931, he was appointed assistant professor of Physiology and Biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine, a post he held until 1935. That same year he assumed the direction of the Department of Physiology of the Medical Research Institute of the University City of Madrid.
In 1936, he returned to Germany, where he began to work as a guest research assistant at the Meyerhof Laboratory in Heidelberg. In 1937 he arrives at Plymouth and there he investigates at the Marine Biology Laboratory.
He emigrated to the United States in 1941 and began working in the Department of Pharmacology at the School of Medicine at the University of Washington, where he carried out enzymological studies with the researchers Carl Cori and Gerty Cori.
He is assistant professor of Biochemistry in 1945, professor and director of the Department of Pharmacology of the same faculty from 1946 to 1954, and professor of Biochemistry and head of the Department of Biochemistry from 1954 until his retirement.
In 1951, he obtained the Bewberg Medal, for his experiments in the field of enzymes, and in 1959 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
In 1971 he was appointed director of the Molecular Biology Laboratory of the Autonomous University of Madrid and in 1985 he moved permanently to Spain. During the 1980s he led two research groups on protein biosynthesis simultaneously, one at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Madrid and another at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in New Jersey. He officially retires in 1975, although he never abandons the investigation.
