Walter Gilbert is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate.
Michael Smith was a British-born Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles as the founding director of the UBC Biotechnology Laboratory and the founding scientific leader of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence (PENCE). In 1996 he was named Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Biotechnology. Subsequently, he became the founding director of the Genome Sequencing Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre.
DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the order of nucleotides in DNA. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The advent of rapid DNA sequencing methods has greatly accelerated biological and medical research and discovery.
Carlos José Bustamante is a Peruvian-American scientist. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Steven M. Block is an American biophysicist and Professor at Stanford University with a joint appointment in the departments of Biology and Applied Physics. In addition, he is a member of the scientific advisory group JASON, a senior fellow of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and an amateur bluegrass musician. Block received his B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University. He has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2007) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000) and is a winner of the Max Delbruck Prize of the American Physical Society (2008), as well as the Single Molecule Biophysics Prize of the Biophysical Society (2007). He served as President of the Biophysical Society during 2005-6. His graduate work was completed in the laboratory of Howard Berg at the University of Colorado and Caltech. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 and went on to do postdoctoral research at Stanford. Since that time, Block has held positions at the Rowland Institute for Science, Harvard University, and Princeton University before returning to Stanford in 1999.
Martin Karplus is an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Strasbourg, France. He is also the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. Karplus received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
William Esco Moerner, also known as W. E. Moerner, is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Andrew Zachary Fire is an American biologist and professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Craig C. Mello, for the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi). This research was conducted at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and published in 1998.
Vamsi K. Mootha is an Indian-born American physician–scientist and computational biologist. He is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Systems Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute.
Alexander van Oudenaarden is a Dutch biophysicist and systems biologist. He is a leading researcher in stem cell biology, specialising in single cell techniques. In 2012 he started as director of the Hubrecht Institute and was awarded three times an ERC Advanced Grant, in 2012, 2017, and 2022. He was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2017.
Helicos BioSciences Corporation was a publicly traded life science company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts focused on genetic analysis technologies for the research, drug discovery and diagnostic markets. The firm's Helicos Genetic Analysis Platform was the first DNA-sequencing instrument to operate by imaging individual DNA molecules. In May 2010, the company announced a 50% layoff and a re-focusing on molecular diagnostics. After long financial troubles, in November 2010, Helicos was delisted from NASDAQ.
The Max Delbruck Prize, formerly known as the Biological physics prize, is awarded by the Division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society, to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in biological physics research. The prize was established in 1981, and renamed for Max Delbrück in 2006. The award consists of $10,000, an allowance for travel to the meeting where the prize is awarded, and a certificate. It was presented biennially in even-numbered years until 2014, and will be presented annually starting 2015.
Thomas Christian Südhof, ForMemRS, is a German-American biochemist known for his study of synaptic transmission. Currently, he is a professor in the school of medicine in the department of molecular and cellular physiology, and by courtesy in neurology, and in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
Martin Gruebele is a German-born American physical chemist and biophysicist who is currently emeritus James R. Eiszner Chair in Chemistry, Professor of Physics, Professor of Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Taekjip Ha is a South Korean-born American biophysicist who is currently a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He was previously the Gutgsell Professor of Physics, at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was the principal investigator of Single Molecule Nanometry group. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Luke Pyungse Lee is the Arnold and Barbara Silverman Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering, Biophysics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at University of California, Berkeley. He is founding director of the Biomedical Institute for Global Health Research and Technology (BIGHEART) at the National University of Singapore.
Sir David Klenerman is a British biophysical chemist and a professor of biophysical chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
Christoph Bock is a German bioinformatician and principal investigator at the Research Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a visiting professor at the Medical University of Vienna.
Polly Fordyce is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford University. Her laboratory's research focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry and single-cell genomics.
Aaron Michael Streets is an African American bioengineer and associate professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California. He is the principal investigator at the Streets Lab, where he and his team use tools from mathematics, physics, and engineering to study biology. Streets is currently developing microfluidic technology for single-cell measurements due to its high-resolution imaging.
