Martin Chalfie

Martin Lee Chalfie (born January 15, 1947) is an American neurobiologist and University Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP), a jellyfish-derived protein that Chalfie demonstrated could serve as a tag to visualize specific proteins and cells in living organisms.

Chalfie earned his A.B. and Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University in 1977, followed by postdoctoral research with Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In 1982, he joined Columbia University, where he became a full professor and later chaired the Department of Biological Sciences from 2007 to 2010. His pioneering 1994 experiment expressed the GFP gene in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, enabling the fluorescent labeling of specific cells and marking the first use of GFP as a biological marker in a multicellular organism, which transformed techniques for studying gene expression and protein dynamics in vivo.

Martin Chalfie was born on January 15, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, as the oldest of three sons to Vivian Chalfie (née Friedlen, born 1913) and Eli Chalfie (born 1910). His mother, raised in Chicago after graduating from Senn High School and briefly attending the University of Chicago, co-owned and operated Mountain Home Smart Apparel, a dress business, alongside her mother, Madeline Friedlen. His father, a musician proficient in mandolin, banjo, and guitar who originated from Cincinnati, Ohio, performed with WLW radio and the Russ Morgan Orchestra, meeting Vivian during World War II at a USO event. Chalfie's paternal grandparents, Benjamin (an immigrant tailor from Brest-Litovsk) and Esther (a cook at Manischewitz who died before his birth), and maternal grandparents, Meyer (born in Moscow and emigrated as an infant) and Madeline Friedlen (a Chicago native who managed a dress business), reflected Eastern European Jewish immigrant roots, though Meyer and Benjamin died early in Chalfie's life.