ROCKVILLE, MD – The Biophysical Society is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2024 Society Awards. These awards are very competitive in nature and are intended to recognize Society members for excellence in biophysics. The winners will be honored at the Society’s 68th Annual Meeting being held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from February 10-14, 2024.
The 2024 Anatrace Membrane Protein Award is given to Susan K. Buchanan, of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for her impactful contributions to the understanding of outer membrane protein folding and insertion, and for structural insights into small and large molecule active transport across the outer membrane.
The 2024 Avanti Award in Lipids is given to Kandice Levental and Ilya Levental, both of University of Virginia, for their collaborative, innovative, and creative science which has made outstanding contributions to the understanding of lipid biophysics, putting them among the world leaders in the field of membrane biophysics.
The 2024 Michael and Kate Bárány Award for Young Investigators is given to Julia Mahamid, of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, for her profound contributions, both technical and biological, to the field of cryo-electron tomography.
The 2024 Carolyn Cohen Innovation Award is given to Takanari Inoue, of Johns Hopkins University, for his distinguished contributions at the interfaces of cell biology, chemical and synthetic biology, and biophysics particularly for technology development to enable actuation of native, as well as artificial, cell functions with biological and biophysical implications.
The 2024 Founders Award is given to Steven G. Boxer, of Stanford University, for his insightful and far-reaching contributions to biophysics using his invention of vibrational Stark spectroscopy coupled with mutational analysis and structure, to provide deep mechanistic understandings of photosynthetic reaction centers, fluorescent proteins, vesicle membrane fusion in self-assembling bilayers, as well as electric field effects in enzymes and proteins.
The 2024 BPS Award in the Biophysics of Health & Disease is given to Nancy Carrasco, of Vanderbilt University, for her seminal and elegant work using biophysical approaches to define and characterize the Sodium/Iodide transporter that is essential for synthesizing thyroid hormone and then translating these findings into important medical applications.
The 2024 Rosalba Kampman Distinguished Service Award is given to Frances Separovic, of the University of Melbourne, for her inspiring service to the Biophysical Society, her ambassadorship of biophysics internationally, and for working vigorously throughout her career to encourage greater participation of women at all levels in science and engineering.
The 2024 Kazuhiko Kinosita Award in Single-Molecule Biophysics is given to Christy F. Landes, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for her exciting developments of single molecule measurement techniques, and their application to chemical and biological systems such as polymers and ion channels.
The 2024 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award is given to Lu Wei, of the California Institute of Technology, for her impactful development of new live-cell functional chemical imaging strategies for quantitative intracellular biophysical analysis.
The 2024 Ignacio Tinoco Award is given to M. Thomas Record, Jr. of University of Wisconsin-Madison, for his pioneering research on the thermodynamics of protein-nucleic acid interactions and his dedication to mentoring and teaching biophysical chemistry to generations of students.
###
The Biophysical Society, founded in 1958, is a professional, scientific society established to lead an innovative global community working at the interface of the physical and life sciences, across all levels of complexity, and to foster the dissemination of that knowledge. The Society promotes growth in this expanding field through its Annual Meeting, publications, and outreach activities. Its 7,500 members are located throughout the world, where they teach and conduct research in colleges, universities, laboratories, government agencies, and industry.