Former professor, two Harvard Ph.D.’s win Nobels

Among this year’s Nobel Prize winners are two Harvard Ph.D.’s and a former professor in the Astronomy Department. Riccardo Giacconi is one the winners of the Nobel Prize for physics. In addition to having held a professorship in astronomy at Harvard, Giacconi was associate director for High Energy Astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the early 1970s.

In economics, Vernon L. Smith garnered the coveted Nobel this year. Currently at George Mason University, Smith received his doctorate from Harvard in 1955.

One of the winners in the category of physiology or medicine this year was H. Robert Horvitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Horvitz received his Harvard Ph.D. in 1974.