The Israel Chemical Society (ICS) has awarded its 2011 Prize for Outstanding Young Chemist to Professor Ashraf Brik, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He receives the prize for the development of novel chemical methods that allow the synthesis of ubiquitinated peptides and proteins. These strategies overcome the limitations of enzymatic methods, which are inherently difficult to apply for obtaining ubiquitin conjugates in a well-defined manner as well as in good quantities.
The prize was presented at the opening ceremony of the 77th annual ICS meeting in Ramat Gan, Israel, on February 7th, 2012.

Ashraf Brik studied chemistry at Ben-Gurion University before moving to Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, for his M.Sc. and Ph.D. In 2002, he took up a postdoctoral position at the Scripps Research Institute, California, USA, in the group of Professor Chi-Huey Wong. He returned to Ben-Gurion University in 2007 as Senior Lecturer and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011.

• Total Synthesis of a 304 Residue, K48-Linked Tetraubiquitin Protein,
  K. S. A. Kumar, S. N. Bavikar, L. Spasser, T. Moyal, S. Ohayon, A. Brik,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 6137-6141.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.201101920
• δ-Mercaptolysine Assisted Ubiquitination,
  K. S. A. Kumar, A. Brik,
  Israel J. Chem. 2011, 51, 900-907.
  DOI: 10.1002/ijch.201100073