[3] He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP".

His maternal grandfather, Meyer L. Friedlen, immigrated to Chicago from Moscow at an early age; his paternal grandparents, Benjamin and Esther Chalfie, came to Cincinnati from Brest-Litovsk[5] and are Jewish.

[7] He spent the summer after his junior year working in the laboratory of Klaus Weber at Harvard, but "It was so disheartening to completely fail that I decided I shouldn't be in biology.

Chalfie conducted his postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston, and the three published a paper in 1985 on "The Neural Circuit for Touch Sensitivity in C.

[11] Chalfie then left the LMB in 1982 to join the faculty of Columbia University in the department of biological sciences and continued to study C. elegans touch mutants.

[7] She gave him permission to cite her unpublished research in his seminal Science paper "Green Fluorescent Protein as a Marker for Gene Expression"[12] on condition that he made coffee, cooked, and emptied the garbage nightly for a month.

The declaration was signed by a total of 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then-President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the successful COP21 climate summit in Paris.