Before scientist Victor Ambros won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday, he was one of eight children growing up on a dairy farm in Hartland, Vt. The 70-year-old biologist has many connections to the Upper Valley region: He was born in Hanover, N.H.; attended Woodstock Union High School; and worked as a professor at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine from 1992 to 2001. Ambros and his colleague Gary Ruvkun won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of microRNAs, tiny molecules that play a crucial role in gene expression and could hold applications in treating diseases from Alzheimer’s to cancer. “My initial thought was great surprise,” Ambros said in an interview with the Nobel Foundation shortly after learning he had won the award. “People from time to time do mention, ‘Oh, you might win a Nobel Prize,’ but I always dismissed that.” In previous interviews, Ambros said he learned his work ethic from his father, a Polish immigrant who spent five years as a teen in a Nazi labor camp before joining the U.S. military and settling in the Upper Valley in the early 1950s. As a child, Ambros received a telescope-building kit from his parents and read a book about inventors that piqued his interest in scientific discovery. He went on to earn both his bachelor’s and doctorate degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His admissions-granting essay to college in 1971 was a succinct six words: “I want to be a scientist.” At MIT, Ambros was surrounded by Nobel royalty: His doctoral adviser was Nobel laureate David Baltimore, and Ambros worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of future Nobel laureate H. Robert Horvitz. Ambros became a faculty member at Harvard University in 1984. He and Ruvkun began making their discoveries about microRNA in the 1990s after noticing anomalies in nematodes, microscopic worms widely used in research as model organisms. Ambros’ wife, Rosalind Lee, also contributed to the research as first author on one of his seminal papers. Ambros is now a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. He still spends time in Hanover, where he and his wife own a house, according to the Valley News. Seven Days was unable to reach Ambros for comment. An administrator at Woodstock Union High School declined to comment, explaining that the school was being inundated with calls about its new Nobel…