Congratulations to Professor Hagan Bayley (Balliol 1970 and Honorary Fellow) on winning the Royal Society Mullard Award. The award is one of a number of prestigious medals and prizes awarded by the society recognizing the work of scientists across the world.
Professor Bayley is Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry at Oxford University. Before his current post he spent spent most of his academic career at leading US academic institutions, including Harvard, MIT, the University of Massachusetts and Texas A&M University. He is best known for his work at the interface between chemistry and biology. He has used protein chemistry, organic chemistry, and biophysics to explore the folding, assembly, and function of transmembrane channels and pores. These studies have led to the development of protein pores as ‘nanoreactors’. Applications of this methodology led to his creation of Oxford Nanopore Technologies in 2005 which is developing electronic systems for analysis of single molecules including DNA, RNA and proteins. In 2014, he founded OxSyBio to build synthetic tissues for regenerative medicine. He has received a number of awards for his research and entrepreneurial skills.
He won the Royal Society Mullard Award for the invention of stochastic nanosensing, a generalised sequencing method for biopolymers which has delivered ultrarapid, distributable, wide-scale, ‘long-read’ genome sequencing.