The following is a list of candidates considered likely to win the Nobel Prize in their respective field. The candidates are so named based on the citation impact of their published research.[1] Since 2024, six of the 29 female Clarivate Citation laureates starting in 2008 were subsequently awarded with a Nobel Prize: Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider in Physiology or Medicine (2009), Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna in Chemistry (2020), Carolyn Bertozzi in Chemistry (2022), and Claudia Goldin in Economics (2023).
| Year | Field | Portrait | Citation Laureate | Nationality | Motivations | Institute |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008[2] | Physics | Vera Rubin (1928–2016) | "for her pioneering research indicating the existence of dark matter in the universe." | Carnegie Institution of Washington | ||
| 2009[3] | Physiology or Medicine | Elizabeth Blackburn (born 1948) | "for their roles in the discovery of and pioneering research on telomeres and telomerases." (selected with Jack W. Szostak) | University of California, San Francisco | ||
| Carol W. Greider (born 1961) | Johns Hopkins School of Medicine | |||||
| Chemistry | Jacqueline Barton (born 1952) | "for their pioneering research of electron charge transfer in DNA." (selected with Bernd Giese and Gary Schuster) | California Institute of Technology | |||
| 2011[4] | Economic Sciences | Anne Krueger (born 1934) | "for their description of rent-seeking behavior and its implications." (selected with Gordon Tullock) | Johns Hopkins University | ||
| 2012[5] | Physics | Lene Hau (born 1959) | "for the experimental demonstration of electromagnetically induced transparency (Harris) and of 'slow light' (Harris and Hau)." (selected with Stephen E. Harris) | Harvard University | ||
| 2015[6] | Deborah S. Jin (1968–2016) | "for pioneering research on atomic gases at ultra-cold temperatures and the creation of the first fermionic condensate." | University of Colorado | |||
| Chemistry | Carolyn Bertozzi (born 1966) | "for foundational contributions to bioorthogonal chemistry." | ||||
| Emmanuelle Charpentier (born 1968) | "for the development of the CRISPR-cas9 method for genome editing." | |||||
| Jennifer Doudna (born 1964) | ||||||
| 2016[7] | Physiology or Medicine | Arlene Sharpe (born 1953) | "for elucidating programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) and its pathway, which has advanced cancer immunotherapy." (selected with Gordon J. Freeman and Tasuku Honjo) | |||
| 2017[8] | Yuan Chang (born 1959) | "for their discovery of the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus, or human herpesvirus 8 (KSHV/HHV8)." (selected with husband Patrick S. Moore) | University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute | |||
| 2018[9] | Physics | Sandra Faber (born 1944) | "for pioneering methods to determine the age, size and distance of galaxies and for other contributions to cosmology." | University of California, Santa Cruz | ||
| Chemistry | JoAnne Stubbe (born 1946) | "for her discovery that ribonucleotide reductases transform ribonucleotides into deoxyribonucleotides by a free-radical mechanism." | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | |||
| 2019[10] | Physiology or Medicine | Philippa Marrack (born 1945) | "for their discovery of T-cell tolerance by clonal elimination in the thymus." (selected with husband John Kappler) | National Jewish Health | ||
| Economic Sciences | Katarina Juselius (born 1943) | "for contributions to econometrics and cointegration analysis." (selected with husband Søren Johansen) | University of Copenhagen | |||
| 2020[11] | Physiology or Medicine | Pamela J. Bjorkman (born 1956) | "for determining the structure and function of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins, a landmark discovery in molecular immunology that has contributed to drug and vaccine development." | California Institute of Technology | ||
| Huda Zoghbi (born 1954) | "for discoveries on the pathogenesis of neurological disorders including the genetic origins of Rett syndrome." | |||||
| Economic Sciences | Claudia Goldin (born 1946) | "for contributions to labor economics, especially her analysis of women and the gender pay gap." | Harvard University | |||
| 2021[12] | Carmen Reinhart (born 1955) | "for contributions to international macroeconomics and insights on global debt and financial crises." | Harvard Kennedy School | |||
| 2022[13] | Physiology or Medicine | Virginia Man-Yee Lee (born 1945) | "for the identification of TDP-43, a pathological signature of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), and for other contributions to the study of neurodegenerative diseases." (selected with Masato Hasegawa) | University of Pennsylvania | ||
| Mary-Claire King (born 1946) | "for demonstrating inherited susceptibility for breast and ovarian cancer and discovering the role played by mutations of the BRCA1 gene." | University of Washington | ||||
| Chemistry | Zhenan Bao (born 1970) | "for the development of novel biomimetic applications of organic and polymeric electronic materials, including flexible 'electronic skin'." | Stanford University | |||
| Bonnie Bassler (born 1962) | "for research on regulation of gene expression in bacteria through quorum sensing, a chemical communication system." (selected with Everett Peter Greenberg) | |||||
| 2023[14] | Physics | Sharon Glotzer (born 1967) | "for demonstrating the role of entropy in the self-assembly of matter and for introducing strategies to control the assembly process to engineer new materials." | University of Michigan | ||
| Chemistry | Karen L. Wooley (born 1972) | "for the development of innovative drug and gene targeting and delivery methods." (selected with Vladimir Torchilin and Kazunori Kataoka) | Texas A&M University | |||
| 2024[15] | Physiology or Medicine | Helen Hobbs (born 1952) | "for research on the genetics of lipid metabolism, which has led to new drugs to treat cardiovascular diseases." (selected with Jonathan C. Cohen) | |||
| Ann Graybiel (born 1942) | "for physiological studies of the basal ganglia, central to motor control and behavior including learning." (selected with Okihide Hikosaka and Wolfram Schultz) | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ||||
| Economic Sciences | Janet Currie (born 1957) | "for pioneering economic analysis of child development." | Princeton University |