New Royal Society honour for University of York scientist
Posted on 9 June 2010
The Royal Society announced today that it had awarded the Gabor Medal to Professor Gideon Davies, who works in the York Structural Biology Laboratory in the Department of Chemistry, for his research into the three-dimensional structures and reaction coordinates of enzymes, which has transformed glycobiochemistry.
Only last month, Professor Davies was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the world’s top honours in science. The Gabor Medal is one of a series of awards to eminent scientists announced by the Royal Society today.
To be awarded a second major honour from the Royal Society is truly amazing and a great privilege
Professor Gideon Davies
Professor Davies said: “To be awarded a second major honour from the Royal Society, just a few weeks after being elected a Fellow, is truly amazing and a great privilege.
"Again it reflects the dedication of my research group, past and present, and the support provided by the Department of Chemistry here at the University of York."
His research focuses on structural enzymology and sugar chemistry. He gained a PhD at the University of Bristol before moving to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Hamburg and then to York with subsequent research periods in Hamburg, Grenoble, Uppsala and British Columbia. He was appointed as one of the University’s "40th Anniversary Professors" in 2004.
Professor Davies has received a number of academic prizes including the 1998 Carbohydrate Research Award, the 2001 Corday-Morgan Medal and the 2008 Peptide and Proteins Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2006 Roy L Whistler award of the International Carbohydrate Organisation and, in 2010, the GlaxoSmithKline award of the Biochemical Society.
The Gabor Medal, created in 1989 to honour the memory of the late Professor Dennis Gabor, is awarded biennially for acknowledged distinction of interdisciplinary work between the life sciences with other disciplines.
Notes to editors:
- The University of York’s Department of Chemistry was ranked in the top ten in the country in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. It was recently placed fourth in the Times Good University Guide and fifth in the Independent Complete University Guide.
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