Carl Richard Woese was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. He was born on July 15, 1928 in Syracuse, New York, USA. Woese attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics in 1950. He then began his graduate studies in the biophysics department at Yale University, receiving a doctorate in 1953. After stints as a researcher at Yale (1953–60), the General Electric Research Laboratory (1960–63), and the Pasteur Institute in Paris (1962), Woese joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1964). There he held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Endowed Chair. Woese’s many honours included a MacArthur fellowship (1984); election to the National Academy of Sciences (1988); the Dutch Royal Academy of Science’s Leeuwenhoek Medal, the highest honour inmicrobiology (1992); and the U.S. National Medal of Science (2000).