Aziz Sancar is a Turkish-American biochemist and molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He has made contributions on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field.
The Sancar lab works on three interrelated subjects: (1) Mammalian DNA Excision Repair; (2) Mammalian DNA Damage Checkpoints; (3) Mammalian Circadian Clock. Although all three systems mediate organismal response to external and internal signals so as to maintain homeostasis and adaptation to the environment by different mechanisms, they are at the organism level, coupled systems.