York scientist wins award for fossil amino acid advance
Posted on 14 January 2008
The Quaternary Research Association (QRA) awarded the Lewis Penny medal to Dr Kirsty Penkman, who is a member of the University’s BioArCh research group.
The award is made annually to a young or new research worker who has made ‘a significant contribution’ to the study of strata from the Quaternary period - the last two million years - in the British Isles and its maritime environment.
I feel tremendously honoured to be awarded this medal
Dr Kirsty Penkman
Dr Penkman, who is a member of the University’s Department of Chemistry and a Wellcome Trust fellow, received the award at the annual meeting of the QRA at the Royal Geographical Society.
Her citation read: "You have been awarded the 2008 Lewis Penny Medal in recognition of your ground-breaking work in the field of amino acid dating techniques".
Dr Penkman's research, into the application of protein breakdown as a dating tool in fossils, has helped to make it a routinely-applicable and reliable method for dating the Quaternary, a time period crucial for our understanding of climate change and human evolution.
Dr Penkman said: "I feel tremendously honoured to be awarded this medal, and I am particularly grateful for all the support that the Quaternary community has given me over the last few years."
ENDS
Notes to editors:
- Lewis Penny was a geology lecturer at the University of Hull from 1949 until his retirement in 1980. He was a founding member of the QRA. He died in 2000, and the Medal was instigated in 2004.
- The Department of Chemistry at the University of York has an excellent reputation for teaching and research. In the last Research Assessment Exercise the department was awarded a 5 rating. It is led by Royal Society of Chemistry prize-winners in all three branches of physical, organic and inorganic chemistry. It has 46 members of academic staff, more than 380 undergraduate students, 150 graduates and 90 research fellows. More information at www.york.ac.uk/depts/chem.
- BioArCh is a joint venture between the Departments of Biology, Archaeology and Chemistry to provide archaeologists with access to full supported analytical facilities. BioArCh uses the Technology Facility based in the Department of Biology for analytical work, but the group also has its own basic laboratories for research and teaching. These include a large 'clean' research laboratory, a soils/sectioning laboratory (also used for teaching), an HPLC laboratory (dedicated to amino acid analysis), an image analysis laboratory, a bone preparation laboratory, a balance room and a mass-spectrometry laboratory.