2018 Breakthrough Prize awarded to Oxford Professor Kim Nasmyth

Professor Kim Nasmyth FRS, Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, has been awarded the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences at a ceremony held in the NASA Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley, California. The Breakthrough Prize - founded in 2013 - is sponsored by global entrepreneurs and philanthropists Sergey Brin (Google), Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Pony Ma (Tencent), Yuri Milner (DST Global) and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki (23andMe). The Life Sciences category recognizes 'transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life.' Winners are chosen by selection committees composed of past laureates, and the recipients are awarded $3 million, making the Breakthrough Prize the richest in international science. The winner's citation honours Kim Nasmyth for 'elucidating the sophisticated mechanism that mediates the perilous separation of duplicated chromosomes during cell division and thereby prevents genetic diseases such as cancer.' - Professor Nasmyth joined the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford in 2005. His work on fundamental aspects of cell division has profound implications for our understanding of chromosome activity in human cancer and other genetic diseases. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and a past recipient of the Louis-Jeantet Prize, Wittgenstein Prize and the Gairdner Foundation International Award.