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The United Kingdom's Top Scientists and Engineers Honoured by the Inaugural Blavatnik Awards for Young ScientistsLONDON, Jan. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences today announced the Laureates and Finalists of the 2018 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom. One Laureate in each of the three Blavatnik Awards categories—Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry—will each receive an unrestricted prize of US$100,000; additionally, two Finalists in each category will each receive unrestricted prizes of US$30,000. The Blavatnik Awards in the UK are the largest unrestricted cash prizes available exclusively to young scientists in the UK. The Blavatnik Awards, established by the Blavatnik Family Foundation in the United States in 2007 and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, honour and support exceptional early-career scientists and engineers aged 42 years or younger. In 2018, the Awards recognise the first cohort of international honourees in the United Kingdom and in Israel. To date, the Blavatnik Awards have conferred prizes totalling US$5 million, honouring 220 outstanding young scientists and engineers. In this inaugural year of the Blavatnik Awards in the UK, 124 nominations were received from 67 academic and research institutions across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. A distinguished jury of leading senior scientists and engineers from throughout the UK selected the Laureates and Finalists. The inaugural Blavatnik Awards Laureates and Finalists in the UK will be honoured at a gala dinner and ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 7th March, 2018. To follow the progress of the Blavatnik Awards, please visit the Awards' website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@BlavatnikAwards). For media requests, please contact Kamala Murthy [[email protected]; +1-212-298-3740] or Alex Pack [[email protected]; +44 (0) 7469 083505].
The 2018 Blavatnik Awards UK Laureates are: Life Sciences
Chemistry
Physical Sciences & Engineering
"In the spirit of the United Kingdom's tradition of scientific excellence and pursuit of knowledge, we are pleased to recognise and support these inaugural Blavatnik Awards Laureates and Finalists as they pursue their careers in advancing their respected fields," said Sir Leonard Blavatnik, Founder and Chairman of Access Industries and head of the Blavatnik Family Foundation. "Through the promise that they have already demonstrated, we are confident they will continue pushing the boundaries of discovery and innovation." "The community of previous Blavatnik Awards honourees is an incredible group of the smartest scientific minds. We are extremely proud to bring the Blavatnik Awards programme to the United Kingdom, recognising outstanding young scientists leading their respective fields," said Ellis Rubinstein, President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences and Chair of the Awards' Scientific Advisory Council. "In its first year, we witnessed terrific enthusiasm from the UK's scientific community and hope to see even more institutions nominate their top Faculty-level scientists in the coming years." 2018 Blavatnik Awards UK Finalists The following scientists have been named Finalists: Life Sciences
Physical Sciences & Engineering
About the 2018 Blavatnik Awards UK Laureates Dr. M. Madan Babu Programme Leader, Computational Biology & Bioinformatics Postdoctoral Scientist, National Institutes of Health, USA Prof. Babu's multi-disciplinary work brings together techniques from structural biology, genomics, and bioinformatics to analyse biological systems at many levels. In one achievement using this approach, Prof. Babu has uncovered mechanistic details of a class of proteins called G-protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs). These proteins are implicated in over a hundred human disorders, and drugs targeting GPCRs represent nearly 30% of all drug sales. Prof. Babu and his team identified key aspects of GPCR biology that will aid in developing more specific, targeted pharmaceuticals. Additionally, Prof. Babu has shown that many GPCRs targeted by common drugs are highly variable in the human population, such that patients with different variants are likely to have different responses to the same drug. This work represents a significant contribution to the relatively new field of personalised medicine. In a parallel body of work, Prof. Babu has also made fundamental discoveries regarding protein structure. About 40% of human proteins have a region that is unstructured compared to normal proteins—these so-called intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) have puzzled structural biologists for decades. Through a combination of computational approaches, big-data analysis, machine learning, and experimental validation, Prof. Babu and his team helped to establish the roles of IDRs in health and disease. Together, these studies shed light on key classes of proteins that are integral to human health. Prof. Andrew Goodwin Professor of Materials Chemistry, Inorganic & Solid-State Chemistry University of Oxford Ph.D., Mineral Physics, University of Cambridge, UK Prof. Goodwin is considered a world leader in probing, investigating, and quantifying the effects of disorder and flexibility in materials that are traditionally thought of as highly ordered and uniform at an atomic scale. His laboratory utilizes advanced diffraction and modelling techniques to probe disordered materials and subsequently produce new, tailored materials that display unique properties. As an example of his approach, most materials will expand upon heating and shrink when compressed; however, Prof. Goodwin has discovered that by careful control of the disorder within the structure of a substance, the opposite can occur—a material can be made that will shrink upon heating (negative thermal expansion) and expand when compressed (negative linear compressibility). These counterintuitive processes can be exploited in the design of heat-resistant materials, advanced pressure sensors, artificial muscles, and even body armour. Additionally, Prof. Goodwin has played a key role in the structural analysis of amorphous materials, which, in the case of amorphous calcium carbonate, the key structural component in bones and shell, led to a complete understanding of the ability of organisms to nucleate different crystalline structures from the same biomineral precursor. Prof. Henry Snaith Professor of Physics; Group Leader, Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics Device Group, Department of Physics Postdoctoral Scientist, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland Prof. Snaith's research has striven to develop new, low-cost photovoltaic technologies based on easily processed materials, which promise to deliver solar energy at a fraction of the cost of current solar technologies. Since 2012, his research has transformed research in the photovoltaics community. He found that metal halide perovskite materials, which had been overlooked for decades because of their very low solar energy conversion efficiency, can be employed in a previously overlooked configuration to create highly efficient solar cells. He has since raised the energy conversion efficiency of the perovskite materials to over 22% when used alone in solar cells, and more recently to 25% by combining perovskites with crystalline silicon cells. Potentially, the perovskite-on-silicon combined cells may deliver a photovoltaic technology capable of surpassing the 30% efficiency mark, making them very promising for industrial applications. Another huge benefit of these perovskite solar cells is their low cost, thanks to the fact they can be processed from solution and that the solar cells are simple layered devices. In addition, Prof. Snaith has significantly improved the long-term stability of perovskite solar cells and significantly advanced our fundamental understanding of the physics of these perovskite semiconductors, which has helped broaden the application range of these materials to include light emission as well as radiation detection, memory, and sensing. Prof. Snaith's work has led in a short period to a very promising new sustainable energy generation option that could quickly surpass our existing solar-cell technologies. About the Blavatnik Family Foundation About the New York Academy of Sciences
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