Each year, the Royal Society recognises exceptional research achievements by awarding a series of prestigious medals and prizes. Of the 25 awards for 2022-23, announced today, four honour Oxford University researchers for their outstanding contributions to science and medicine.
Professor Hagan Bayley FRS receives the Buchanan Medal for founding Oxford Nanopore Technology, the highly successful biotech company.
Professor Artur Ekert FRS receives the Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture for his pioneering contributions to quantum communication and computation.
Sir Antony Hoare FREng FRS receives the Royal Medal (Physical) for ground-breaking contributions that have revolutionised the computer programming field, including the development of "Hoare logic."
Professor Herman Waldmann FMedSci FRS receives the Royal Medal (Biological) for pioneering monoclonal antibodies for human therapy.
Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society said, 'On behalf of the Royal Society, I offer my congratulations to all the 2023 recipients of Medals and Awards. The breadth and scope of scientific knowledge and experience reflected in this year's nominations is nothing short of phenomenal. I am very proud to celebrate such outstanding scientific contributions from so many different specialisms around the world.'
More about the medal winners:
Hagan Bayley is the Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford.
Awarded: Buchanan Medal
I am delighted to be recognised for the founding of Oxford Nanopore, the company that has developed a means to sequence DNA and RNA with an inexpensive portable device providing exceedingly long reads. Work on nanopore sensing and sequencing was initiated by highly talented members of my academic laboratory and brought to fruition by the formidable team at Oxford Nanopore.
Professor Hagan Bayley
Professor Bayley's award recognises his role in founding the successful biotech company Oxford Nanopore Technologies. This was a spinout from his fundamental research into the assembly and function of bacterial pore-forming proteins in mammalian cell membranes. Recognising the potential applications for biotechnology, Professor Bayley and his team engineered pores capable of interacting with molecules of interest, ranging from small organic molecules to polymers of enormous length. In this way, they developed a method to identify and sequence molecules as they passed through the pore by measuring changes in an electrical current driven by a voltage applied across the nanopore.
In 2005, Professor Bayley founded Oxford Nanopore Technologies to develop a nanopore sensing platform. The company furthered the technology by building powerful portable nanopore-based devices for DNA and RNA sequencing. Oxford Nanopore devices have since revolutionised fundamental and clinical genomics and played a critical role in research across cancer, human genetics, and infectious diseases. Professor Bayley continues to conduct fundamental research into nanopore technologies, with current interests including protein variant characterisation; understanding the making and breaking of individual chemical bonds; and building synthetic tissues in which nanopores allow the compartments to communicate with each other and the external environment.
