Special relationship with US and global crystallography earns award for chemist

09 Aug 2013

Professor John Helliwell from the School of Chemistry has received the American Crystallographic Association’s 2014 Patterson Award.

Presented every three years, the ACA Patterson Award recognizes and encourages outstanding research in the structure of matter by diffraction methods.

Professor Helliwell is a long-time member of the ACA, a non-profit, scientific organization with over 2,200 members in more than 60 countries, which aims to promote interactions among scientists who study the structure of matter at atomic (or near atomic) resolution.

John was selected to receive the award for his pioneering contributions to the development of the instrumentation, methods and applications of synchrotron radiation in macromolecular crystallography.

During a career dedicated to exploring new applications of synchrotron radiation and to improving synchrotron and neutron facilities worldwide, he has fostered several projects in the US and has served on many advisory and board panels to review synchrotron projects. He collaborated with various USA crystallographers and researchers over the last four decades notably in Alabama, Stanford, Purdue, Cornell and Chicago. His work at the Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury Laboratory near Manchester was highlighted for example in Scientific American.

John’s University of Manchester PhD research students are highlighted in the Award citation as ‘some of today’s finest beam line scientists in the world and who John nurtured’. Others of John’s PhD students have gone onto crystallography careers in America as well, for example in the Medical Research Institute, Buffalo and Yale University Pharmacy Department.

His special relationship with American crystallography and the crucial contributions he has made to improve synchrotron radiation applications from the every beginning of the synchrotron era, in the USA and globally, are described by the ACA announcement as key for John’s selection as the 2014 Paterson Award recipient.

He will receive the award at the 2014 ACA meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.