It’s often said that behind every great man is a great woman — for UNC’s two Nobel Prize winners Aziz Sancar and Oliver Smithies, this is certainly true.

“Well I came (to UNC) because my wife came here,” Smithies said. “I came on my wife’s coattails. She got a job offered and so I asked ‘was there anyone interested in me coming to Chapel Hill.'”

Smithies was hired in 1988, six years after Sancar, who arrived under similar circumstances.

After finishing his postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, Sancar said he applied to 50 schools, with UNC being the only one that offered him a job.

“I also give UNC credit for being progressive for that time,” he said. “I think we were the first couple to be hired to the same university, not just the same university, the same department.”

When UNC offered the Sancars jobs, they surely couldn’t have known they just hired a future Nobel Laureate.

But even more surprising is that with these hires they ensured themselves, not just one future Nobel Prize winner, but two.

Aziz Sancar was part of the team that recruited Smithies’ wife, Nobuyo Maeda.

“I was on the search committee,” Sancar said. “I remember arguing the case. She did some very good work.”

Smithies won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 2007, while Sancar won in Chemistry in 2015.

“Some of our crucial work was done with Dr. Smithies,” Sancar said. “We have a joint paper.”

The two scientists shared their stories with UNC System president Margaret Spellings and chancellor Carol Folt Wednesday when Spellings visited the university.

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