Congratulations to...

Andrew Taylor, Director of ISIS since 1993, on the award of an OBE for 'services to neutron scattering'.

Mark Harris (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) received the 1999 Philips prize during the Closing Ceremony at the IUCr XVIII in Glasgow. It was given for his work in the field of magnetic frustration and, in particular, for his work in the area of magnetic pyrochlores.

Judith Howard (U. of Durham) received a £100,000 grant from the Wolfson Foundation of the Royal Society and the award for structural chemistry honoring her pioneering work of x-ray and neutron diffraction for locating hydrogen atoms in the presence of heavy metals. The grant will be used to create a bioinformatics centre. She also received a EPSRC senior fellowship award which allowed her to take a five-year sabbatical from teaching duties to do research. Alan Leadbetter commented '...she does too many things - but she does them all well'.

Frank C. Hawthorne (U. of Manitoba) was awarded the 1999 Past-Presidents' Medal of the Mineralogical Assn of Canada.

ILL welcomes its two new associate directors, Colin Carlile as head of the projects and techniques division and Christian Vettier, head of the science division.

In 1973 Alexander Rich, a professor at the Massachusetts Inst. of Technology produced the first X-ray crystallographic structure of a double helix with atomic level resolution for his half century of probing the structures of DNA and RNA. Alex has been named the recipient of the $250,000 Bower Award for Achievement in Science from the Franklin Institute on Philadelphia.

Ian K. Robinson of the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was chosen to receive the 2000 B.E. Warren Award from the ACA for his innovative application of diffraction techniques to the study of crystal surfaces. Since his earlier discovery of the importance of crystal truncation rods for understanding surface structure, he has continued to introduce new ideas for the physics of surface structures and transitions, including the recent use of reflectivity measurements with coherent X-rays to obtain a new kind of information about crystal surfaces. The award will be presented to Dr. Robinson at the ACA Meeting in St. Paul in July.

Lyle Jensen has been named the recipient of the Buerger Award of the ACA for 2000. Dr. Jensen's attention to detail, his understanding of the fundamentals of crystallography (exemplified by his well-used textbook), and his utmost faith that an experiment could be and should be carried out to the precision the method was capable of, are what underlie his ground-breaking work in finding hydrogen atoms, in proving that protein structures could be refined and in providing good phase information. Dr Jensen will receive his award at a ceremony at the ACA meeting in St. Paul in July.

The American Chemical Society Division of Biological Chemistry presented awards at the 1999 ACS national meeting to David S. Eisenberg, professor of molecular biology and chemistry at the U. of California, Los Angeles (received (the Repligen Award); and John Kuriyan, who is Patrick E & Beatrice M Haggerty Professor at Rockefeller U. as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Inst. investigator, (the Lilly Award). Eisenberg has focused on the relationship of protein sequence to threedimensional structure and function profile methods for describing a family of amino acids sequences and the field known as threading or fold prediction. Kuriyans research concerns the atomic level mechanisms of intracellular signal transduction and the process of chromosomal DNA replication.

Brian W. Matthews (U. of Oregon and Howard Hughes Medical Inst.) is the recipient of the 2000 Stein and Moore Award from the Protein Society, which is sponsored by the Merck Foundation, for his pioneering contributions to X-ray crystallographic methods, protease structure, gene regulation and mutational analysis of protein stability. The award will be presented at the 14th Annual Symposium in San Diego, Augsust 5-9, 2000.