George H. Lorimer

Inducted in 2009 for his work on the mechanism of RuBisCO, the enzyme that fixes CO2 in photosynthesis, and on the chaperonin proteins that assist RuBisCO to form its three-dimensional structure.

Dr. George Lorimer is Distinguished University Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Maryland-College Park since 1998. Originally from Scotland, he earned his Ph.D. degree at Michigan State University in 1972 and did postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany. After holding scientific posts in Australia and Germany he became a Principal Investigator and Research Leader in the central research and development department at the DuPont Company in 1978 where he pioneered the study of the structure, assembly, activation, and reaction mechanism of Rubisco, the key enzyme in photosynthetic carbon fixation, and the role of chaperonin-assisted protein folding. He won the 1997 Alexander von Humbold Research Prize and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1997.

Dr. Lorimer was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 and is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.