ROCKVILLE, MD – The Biophysical Society is delighted to announce its 2020 Society Fellows. This award honors the Society’s distinguished members who have demonstrated excellence in science, contributed to the expansion of the field of biophysics, and supported the Biophysical Society. The Fellows will be honored at the Awards Ceremony during the Biophysical Society’s 64th Annual Meeting on Monday February 17, 2020, at the San Diego Convention Center in California. The Fellows are:

Steven Chu, PhD, Stanford University, USA, for exceptional applications of optical and polymer physics to the study of single biomolecules that led to mechanistic insights into the dynamics of enzymes, RNA, and DNA, and for his tireless service to the scientific community as a public intellectual and as US Secretary of Energy.

Taekjip Ha, PhD, Johns Hopkins University, USA, for his contributions to single molecule biophysics approaches which have furthered our understanding of complex interacting biological systems.

Charalampos Babis Kalodimos, PhD, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, USA, for elucidating important functional roles of protein-ligand binding, protein allostery, and chaperone-substrate interactions through pioneering applications of NMR spectroscopy. 

Eva Nogales, PhD, University of California, Berkeley, USA, for pushing the barriers of what was thought possible using cryo-EM, which resulted in important insights into the cytoskeleton, central dogma machinery, and dynamics of cell division.

Benjamin Schuler, PhD, University of Zurich, Switzerland for the development and application of advanced single-molecule methods for uncovering physical principles underlying protein folding, dynamics, and interactions.

Cynthia Wolberger, PhD, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA for transforming our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying which genes regulation through elegant structural studies.

Hao Wu, PhD, Harvard University, Boston Children’s Hospital, USA for fundamentally revising how we view intracellular signaling and cellular organization, through discovering supramolecular “signalosomes” formed by innate immune signaling proteins, mechanisms that govern cooperative assembly, and proximity-driven enzyme activation.