Top honours for York scientists
Posted on 7 July 2011
The research team – The Collaborative Computational Project Number 4 in Protein Crystallography (CCP4) – is responsible for software developments which underpin research in the pharmaceutical industry and academic laboratories worldwide.
In recognition of their contribution to both chemistry and the life sciences, CCP4 has been awarded The Rita and John Cornforth Award, an annual honour from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) presented to collaborative research teams.
CCP4 was set up in 1979 by a consortium of academics to promote collaboration between researchers working in structural biology in the UK. As a community based resource, it supports academic, not for profit and profit research, and also aims to play a key role in the education and training of scientists in experimental structural biology.
Professor Gideon Davies from York’s Department of Chemistry nominated the CCP4 team for the RSC award. He said: “The CCP4 team really is one of the jewels of UK collaborative science. It has assembled a comprehensive collection of software which has been used in all the great structural biology developments of recent years, and by most – if not all – of the recent Nobel Prize winning scientists working in X-ray crystallography.”
The RSC Rita and John Cornforth Award will be presented to the team at a symposium arranged by the Chemistry Biology Interface Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The CCP4 team will receive £2,000, a medal and certificate.
The CCP4 team draws in top academics from across the UK, with many of its key figures based in the Department of Chemistry at York. Among them is Professor Eleanor Dodson, who has received a second honour. Together with colleagues from Italy and Germany, Professor Dodson has received the Ewald Prize which is presented once every three years for outstanding contributions to crystallography. The award from the International Union of Crystallography recognises the enormous impact the academics have made on the computational side of the field.
Professor Dodson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (Britain's leading scientific honour) in 2003 and has been a researcher at the University since 1976. She will receive the Ewald Prize, which consists of a medal, a certificate and an award of $10,000 at the International Congress of Crystallography in Madrid in August.
Professor Dodson said: “I am honoured to receive these awards. It reflects the great contribution CCP4 has made to the rapid development of structural biology.”
Notes to editors:
- The Collaborative Computational Project Number 4 in Protein Crystallography is supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and coordinated at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Rutherford Laboratory by the Computational Science and Engineering Department of STFC. It produces and supports a world-leading, integrated suite of programs that allows researchers to determine macromolecular structures by X-ray crystallography and other biophysical techniques. Crystallography is the technique which can provide the most detailed structural information from a molecule.
- The following academic staff from the University of York play key roles in the CCP4 team: Professor Eleanor Dodson, Professor Keith Wilson, Dr Kevin Cowtan, Dr Garib Murshudov, Dr Stuart McNicholas, Dr Liz Potterton and Dr Fei Long.
- The Ewald Prize has been awarded to Professor Eleanor Dodson (Department of Chemistry, University of York, UK), Professor Carmelo Giacovazzo (Institute of Crystallography-CNR, Bari, Italy) and Professor George Sheldrick (Lehrstuhl für Strukturchemie, Göttingen, Germany) for the enormous impact they have made on structural crystallography by designing new methods and providing these in algorithms and constantly maintained, renewed and extended user software. Their invaluable contributions to the computational side of the field have led to leadership with the program suites CCP4, SIR and SHELX, respectively. For more information on the Ewald Prize visit www.iucr.org/iucr/ewald08.html.
- For more information on the RSC Rita and John Cornforth Award visit www.rsc.org/ScienceAndTechnology/Awards/RitaandJohnCornforthAward/.
- For more information on the University of York’s Department of Chemistry visit www.york.ac.uk/chemistry.
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