Submitted by Administrator on Thu, 30/04/2020 - 12:14
The Cavendish Laboratory is proud to announce that two of its staff members, Professor Didier Queloz and Dr Sarah Teichmann, have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society.
We congratulate them both on this well-deserved recognition of their outstanding research. The full text of the Royal Society biographies is below.
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Didier Queloz is Professor of physics at Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory and part-time at Geneva University. He is at the origin of the ’exoplanet revolution’ in astrophysics when in 1995 during his PhD with his supervisor they announced the first discovery of a giant planet orbiting another star, outside the solar system. They received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for this spectacular discovery that kick started the rise of exoplanet researches.
Over the next 25 years, Didier Queloz scientific contributions have essentially been to make progress in detection and measurement of exoplanet systems with the goal to retrieve information on their physical structure. He participated and he conducted programs leading to the detection of hundred planets, include many breakthrough results. More recently he is directing his activity to the detection of Earth like planets and Universal life.
He participated to numerous documentaries movies, articles TV and radio interviews to share excitement and to promote interest for science in general and particularly topics about exoplanets and life in the Universe.
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Sarah Teichmann develops computational methods, to explore structural biology, genomics and single cell biology data. She showed that protein complexes assemble via stereotypical pathways, helping us understand mechanisms of genetic diseases including cancer. These insights aid design in protein engineering, and in deciphering protein interaction and cell communication networks. Applying analogous ideas, she uncovered principles of transcriptional network evolution in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. She pioneered application of single cell technologies, coupled with innovative computational methods, to study human tissues, discovering novel immune, epithelial, and stromal cell states across development, adult and disease tissue. Human studies include exploration of the maternal-fetal interface, complex lymphoid organs such as the thymus, and systems such as the airways. These approaches have delivered insights into human disease including cancer, respiratory, and auto-immune disease and have profound implications for therapeutic development including target discovery, tissue engineering and cell therapies.
Sarah is co-founder and co-leader of the international Human Cell Atlas consortium, which uses single cell genomics and spatial methodologies to create a comprehensive high resolution map of the human body.