In awarding the 2026 honorary degrees, President Maurie McInnis read the following personalized citation.
Groundbreaking scientist, you have transformed our understanding of how life operates and evolves at the molecular level and reshaped how we think about the chemistry of living systems. Your deep and elegant research has revealed how enzymes harness the reactivity of free radicals—unstable entities often associated with damage and disorder—to carry out the precise chemistry required for life, enabling new targets for therapeutic development.
Beloved and inspiring mentor and teacher, winner of a long list of impressive awards, including the National Medal of Science, the highest domestic honor for a scientist, we recognize we make a very “unradical” decision to add to your many distinctions with a Doctor of Science degree, which we are honored to confer with the greatest admiration and pleasure.
JoAnne Stubbe is an eminent chemist renowned for her groundbreaking research on the mechanism of ribonucleotide reductases (RNRs), essential enzymes required for DNA synthesis and repair in all organisms. Stubbe’s interdisciplinary approach has significantly advanced our understanding of enzyme catalysis and the interface between chemistry and biology. She is professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and retired in 2016. She continues to work on RNRs with students and her long-time collaborator, Daniel Nocera, professor of chemistry, at Harvard University.
Stubbe, born in 1946, spent most of her early life in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. From an early age, she loved nature, spending hours swinging from grapevines in the woods and listening to loons at Deering Reservoir in southern New Hampshire. These experiences fostered her curiosity and passion for the natural world. Stubbe attended the University of Pennsylvania and received her BA in chemistry in 1968. She then pursued graduate studies in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, during the Vietnam War era, when campus protests at times prompted heighted security responses, including the use of tear gas. She earned her PhD in organic chemistry in three years. Her research adviser, George Kenyon, led one of Berkeley’s first chemistry labs who focused on enzyme catalysis, despite the perception at the time that this “field” lacked rigor.
Stubbe’s first faculty appointment was at Williams College, then newly coeducational. She also received an NIH grant to work on enzymes! She had the catalysis bug. She took a leave from Williams to work with Robert Abeles, a renowned enzymologist at Brandeis University. She did not return to Williams College but took a job in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale Medical School (1977-1980). There she shared a tiny office with another new young hire, John Kozarich. They both embraced technology to solve problems at the interface of biology and chemistry. Stubbe worked in the lab; she loved it and there were few graduate students. She then moved to the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where there were many graduate students. There, she continued to enjoy working in the lab and also learned molecular biology. Drawn back to Massachusetts and family, she moved in 1987 to the Department of Chemistry at MIT, where she spent the remainder of her career. At MIT, she continued her long-standing research on the enzyme RNR. Working with graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, she examined how enzymes harness free radicals to carry out highly demanding chemical transformations, while maintaining precise control. In 1994, Stubbe and fifteen other women faculty at MIT drafted and signed a letter to the Dean of the School of Science describing inequalities they identified in space, resources, salaries, and teaching assignments compared with those of their male colleagues. Their report, which became known as, “The Hopkins Report,” prompted change at MIT and beyond. Stubbe’s contributions extend beyond her research. As an educator, she inspired several generations of scientists to pursue interdisciplinary approaches to biochemical problems.
Stubbe’s accolades include the National Medal of Science in 2008, election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the MIT Killian Faculty Award in 2012, the Yale First Distinguished Woman Science Award in 2013, and the Pearl Meister Greengard International Award to recognize outstanding women in Biomedical Science in 2017. Stubbe has been awarded honorary doctor of science degrees from Harvard University (2013), the Scripps Research Institute (2018), and Northwestern University (2020).
