Yonath is the first Israeli woman to receive a Nobel Prize, sharing the chemistry prize in 2009 for work on ribosomes, which are crucial proteins in cells. She used X-ray crystallography to map ribosomes’ structure, important in the production of antibodies. She built Israel’s first protein crystallography lab at the Weizmann Institute, her alma mater, where she heads the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly.