Before Wednesday's announcement that Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for their "discovery of non-linear effects and auto catalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis," only a select group knew of the winners ahead of time. Rice University professor Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede was one of them.
Wittung-Stafshede is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She also served for years on the committee that selects the prize recipient.
"The Nobel Prize has been around since early 1901," she said in an interview with Houston Public Media. "I'm the third-ever woman in the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. So it's not that much turnaround, and it's been very few women involved this early on."
Wittung-Stafshede earned her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in 1996 at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. After teaching in the United States for some time, she became an associate professor at Rice in 2004. By 2008, she returned to Sweden and was eventually elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2016.
Within the Royal Academy, the chemistry class has 18 members who are under the age of 65 — "And then you have a bunch of older members," Wittung-Stafshede said. Eight members of the Royal Academy’s chemistry class are selected to join the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, which decides the nominees and recipients of the coveted prize.
"I was just like, ‘Can a person like me become a member of the Nobel Committee?'" she said. "That's almost as fun as getting the Nobel Prize."
Wittung-Stafshede said that when she joined the committee, there was only one other woman, who was finishing her term. In 2020, Wittung-Stafshede was selected for the committee.
"I’ve done a lot of things because I’m a woman — or you become the first one to do something, or you’re the only one," she said. "And you know, if that would help me to get in the Nobel Committee, I wouldn’t care, because that’s something I want to do. But, I mean, truly, it should be my expertise [that decides]."
During her time on the Nobel Committee, Wittung-Stafshede helped select more than a dozen winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
It's a long, drawn-out process to select a winner, which is done almost entirely in secret by the committee. Though the official selection process lasts about a year, Wittung-Stafshede estimated the period between a scientist's name first being mentioned by the committee to ultimately receiving the award can last between five and 10 years.
The process begins with the nomination of scientists. The Nobel committee permits select groups and organizations to nominate scientists for the prize, meaning more than 1,000 people are allowed to nominate as many as nine individuals each. Typically, however, the response rate is much lower: Wittung-Stafshede said there are typically about 600 nominations each year.
The nominations are then divided among the committee members to research.
"I don't care about the names; I convert the names to a topic," Wittung-Stafshede said. "Then, I ask experts around the world to write me secret reports on that topic. ‘Do you think there's anything good in optogenetics, and, if so, Nobel Prize worthy? Who would be the winners or the laureates I would get? Who did the work?' We collect those reports back from people. And these are secret things — I cannot email about this. So, I call people up ... You cannot tell anybody you do this work, but you still have to do the work."
The results of those reports lead the committee to come up with a shortlist of potential winners. They take into consideration things like how impactful the nominees' research was, and whether or not they have published anything from it. Once the committee selects a winner, they compile a report summarizing all the work they have done in the past year, including the selected winner, to present to the chemistry class at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
That's how Wittung-Stafshede knew the winners this year, despite no longer being on the committee, she is still a member of the chemistry class. After serving on the illustrious Nobel Committee for Chemistry for six years, she left that role to move to Houston and teach at Rice.
The secrecy of the Nobel Committee was, in part, what led to her decision to leave the committee. She could have stayed on for another six years, but the committee meets in person every month.
"We have a meeting in Stockholm once a month — a physical meeting, because everything is secret," she said. "We don't email things. You have to be there, and you talk in person. And I cannot go to Stockholm once a month."
In July 2025, she returned to Houston as a chemistry professor, researching the underlying mechanisms in human diseases. She eventually left her role on the Nobel Committee earlier this year.
Speaking with Houston Public Media the day before the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced, Wittung-Stafshede said she knew she would miss the adrenaline of unveiling the prize and phoning up the winners to tell them they've received a Nobel Prize.
"It's kind of an adrenaline kick," she said. "I kind of miss that. But I have many good memories to think back to. And I know you do things for a certain amount of time, and you should stop before you get tired of it."
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