Aziz Sancar (born 8September 1946) is a Turkish molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He has made contributions on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field. Sancar is currently the Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is the co-founder of the Aziz & Gwen Sancar Foundation, which is a non-profit organization to promote Turkish culture and to support Turkish students in the United States. Early life Aziz Sancar was born on 8 September 1946 to a lower-middle-class family in the Savur district of Mardin Province, southeastern Turkey. His oldest brother Kenan Sancar is a retired brigadier general in the Turkish Armed Forces. He is the second cousin of the politician Mithat Sancar, who is a member of parliament from and chairman of HDP. He was the seventh of eight children. His parents were uneducated; however, they put great emphasis on his education. He was educated by idealistic teachers who received their education in the Village Institutes, he later stated that this was a great inspiration to him. Throughout his school life, Sancar had great academic success that was noted by his teachers. He wanted to study chemistry whilst at high school, but was persuaded to study medicine after five of his classmates also got into medicine along with him. As such, he studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Istanbul University. Origins According to his own account, he spoke Arabic with his parents and Turkish with his siblings. However, when asked about his origins, Sancar only underlined his Turkish nationality. Still, his cousin, Mithat Sancar, mentioned that their family is of Arab origins. Aziz Sancar's brother Tahir claimed in an interview that their family descended from Oghuz Turks from Central Asia, also mentioning that they are idealists. Education Sancar received his primary education near his hometown of Savur. He then completed his MD degree in Istanbul University of Turkey in 1969 and completed his PhD degree on the photoreactivating enzyme of E. coli in 1977 at the University of Texas at Dallas in the laboratory of Claud Stan Rupert, now Professor