Frances Arnold will give the 2019 Francis Crick Lecture on Thursday 18th July at 4.00pm in the LMB’s Max Perutz Lecture Theatre. The title of the lecture is ‘Innovation by evolution: bringing new chemistry to life’. The event is open to anyone in the local area who is interested in attending.
LMB researchers have taken part in this year’s MRC Festival of Medical Research by hosting visits from local school students, contributing to a primary school science day, and participating in the MRC Festival Zone of “I’m a scientist, get me out of here!”. The MRC Festival of Medical Research is held annually in June as an opportunity for MRC-funded units, centres, and institutes to showcase and discuss their work through events and activities around the UK.
The LMB is delighted to announce the appointment of Kelly Nguyen as a Group Leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division. She will take up her post in August 2019. Kelly will be working on the mechanism of telomere maintenance. Telomeres are located at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes and play essential roles in maintaining genome stability by protecting the genome against erosion and inter-chromosomal fusion.
Garib Murshudov, a group leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, and Lalita Ramakrishnan, a group leader in the University of Cambridge Molecular Immunity Unit at the LMB, have been newly elected as members of EMBO.
Founded in 1964 to promote molecular biology in Europe, EMBO elects new members annually in recognition of their contributions to scientific excellence.
M. Madan Babu, a Group Leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, has been awarded the EMBO Gold Medal for his “fundamental contributions to the field of computational molecular biology”. Madan shares the prize with Paola Picotti at ETH Zurich.
The EMBO Gold Medal is awarded annually to scientists under 40 for outstanding contributions to the life sciences in Europe.
Michael Rossmann, Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at Purdue University and former scientific staff at the LMB, where he worked with Max Perutz on the structure of haemoglobin, has died on 14th May 2019 at the age of 88. Michael was a very gifted crystallographer whose main strength was in mathematics and computer programming.
Menna Clatworthy, a Group Leader in the University of Cambridge Molecular Immunity Unit based at the LMB, has won a prestigious EFIS-IL (European Federation of Immunological Societies-Immunology Letters) Lecture Award, having been described by the nominating body as “a true clinician scientist of the 21st century – continuously pushing boundaries of biomedical insight at the interface of fundamental immunology, clinical immunology and systems precision medicine”.
Felix Randow, a group leader in the LMB’s PNAC Division, has been elected into the Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
The Academy represents the diversity of medical science, with Fellows drawn from a range of professions, including laboratory science, clinical academic medicine, medical and nursing care, as well as areas allied to medical science, such as ethics, social science and the law.
Claudia Bonfio, a postdoctoral researcher in John Sutherland’s group in the LMB’s PNAC Division, has been awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2019 Dalton Emerging Researcher Award for her “development of chemistry to investigate the chemical roots of iron-sulfur dependent metabolism”.
The Dalton Emerging Researcher Award is given annually to recognise the achievements of an inorganic chemist working in, or originally from, the UK who is within two years of completion of their PhD.
Ana Casañal, a postdoctoral researcher in Lori Passmore’s group in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, is one of two recipients of the FEBS Anniversary Prizes 2019.