Sarah Teichmann receives EMBO Gold Award

Wellcome Genome Campus research group leader Sarah Teichmann recognised for excellence in science.

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Gold Award 2015 has been awarded to Sarah Teichmann, Research Group Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and Senior Group Leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in recognition of her contribution to science. The award underscores the increasing importance of informatics and interdisciplinary research in biology.

Teichmann received the Gold Medal “for her use of computational and experimental methods to better understand genomes, proteomes and evolution”. EMBO recognised in particular her research into the regulation of gene expression and the nature of protein complexes, the evolutionary conservation of assembly pathways of protein complexes, and predicting these pathways based on three-dimensional protein structures.

“Sarah’s expertise in bioinformatics seems infinitely adaptable and is coupled with skills for directing exquisitely controlled laboratory-based experiments,” says EMBO Member Professor Veronica van Heyningen. “Such broad-spectrum abilities are rare.”

“Informatics has always been at the heart of my research, using statistics and computer science to tease out meaning from the ‘wet-lab’ experiments we carry out,” says Teichmann, co-founder of the Sanger Institute–EMBL-EBI Single Cell Genomics Centre. “Informatics has become an essential component of biology, as genomics and imaging become more and more prevalent. It offers countless opportunities and challenges as new technologies such as single-cell sequencing come to the fore, demanding new methods from computer science, maths and physics.”

Teichmann will receive her medal with fellow awardee Ido Amit on 5 September 2015 at the opening session of The EMBO Meeting in Birmingham.

---

About Sarah Teichmann

Dr Sarah Teichmann graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1996 with a degree in Natural Sciences (Biochemistry). She then joined Dr Cyrus Chothia’s group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to study computational genomics. Her PhD thesis explored protein families and the domain organisation of proteins in the first completely sequenced genomes. In 2001, Dr Teichmann started a research group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, near Cambridge, where she holds a joint appointment at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

About the Wellcome Genome Campus

The Wellcome Genome Campus is home to some of the world’s most advanced institutes working at the interface of genomics and computational biology. The campus brings together a diverse and exceptional scientific community in a culture and environment that fosters creativity and rewards bold, ambitious thinking. They are committed to delivering life-changing science with the reach, scale and imagination to deliver solutions to some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

This post was originally published on EMBL-EBI News.

---

Tags: award, embo, teichmann