Researchers honoured in Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists

Two scientists from Oxford University are among the laureates and finalists of the 2019 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom, announced today by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences. One laureate in each of the three Blavatnik Awards categories-Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemistry-will each receive a prize of US$100,000, and two finalists in each category will each receive US$30,000. The Blavatnik Awards in the UK are the largest unrestricted cash prizes available exclusively to young scientists in the UK. Professor Philipp Kukura of Oxford's Department of Chemistry has been named as the 2019 Chemistry Laureate. Professor Kukura is revolutionising the way we visualise and study processes in nature. By detecting and measuring the scattering of visible light from single biomolecules, he can determine their mass and thereby analyse their structure and properties. He hopes that this approach will be used widely to discover how biomolecules assemble, interact and thus function, as well as understand what goes wrong in disease, and how it can be addressed at a molecular level.