ABOUT THE 2018 MEDALISTS

Dr. Robert Glaeser (Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley) is a biophysicist and structural biologist who grew up in Wisconsin, where he obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After completing the Ph.D. in Biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, he spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow in Oxford and a second year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. He then returned to Berkeley as a faculty member and as a Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His University service includes a 5-year term as Divisional Dean of Biological Sciences, and his professional service includes a term as president of the Microscopy Society of America and a term as council member of the Biophysical Society. His professional honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt Award, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Richard Henderson (MRC Laboratory of Microbiology, Cambridge) is a Scottish biophysicist and molecular biologist who was the first to successfully produce a three-dimensional image of a biological molecule at atomic resolution using a technique known as cryo-electron microscopy. Henderson's refinement of imaging methods for cryo-electron microscopy, in which biomolecules are frozen in such a way that allows them to retain their natural shape and are then visualized with a high-resolution microscope, enabled researchers to capture images of numerous biomolecular structures that previously could not be imaged by other means. He was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with biophysicists Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank) for his work.