Lia Addadi

Lia Addadi (; born 1950) is a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She works on crystallization in biology, including biomineralization, interactions with cells, and crystallization in cell membranes. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2017 for “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research”,

Early life and education

Addadi was born in Padua. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry at the University of Padua and graduated in 1973. She moved to Rehovot for her PhD supervised by Meir Lahav on the synthesis of chiral polymers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, She started to work on crystal growth during her PhD, and, by chance, met Steve Weiner, who was working on biomineralization. Together they investigated many biominerals, including demonstrating the matrix sheets of crystals in nacre (mother of pearl).

Addadi returned to the Weizmann Institute of Science as an associate professor in 1988. She demonstrated that macromolecules in the shells of mollusks determine the polymorphism of aragonite and calcite. She went on to establish the role of amorphous calcium carbonate in biomineralization. Addadi identified that mollusks build their shells using hydrophobic silk gels, aspartic acid, acid-rich proteins, and an amorphous precursor.

Addadi is interested in how macromolecules nucleate oriented growth and how morphology changes through interactions with surfaces. This can help too understand how diseases such as gout, osteoarthritis, and atherosclerosis form crystals in body fluids. She was the first woman to win the ETH Zurich prelog prize in 1989. She was appointed dean of the faculty of chemistry in 2001. She demonstrated that in cell culture, crystals adopt a similar shape to the atherosclerotic plaque that forms in cells, because they are formed from the same cholesterol. The crystals adopt helical or tubular forms. Addadi used stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy and soft X-ray tomography to identify the cholesterol inside cells.

Awards and honours 1986 Weizmann Institute of Science Ernst David Bergmann prize in Chemistry 2009 Israel Chemical Society Prize for Excellence 2011 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Gregori Aminoff Prize for Crystallography 2017 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences