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Bricogne receives honorary doctorate

[Bricogne]Gérard Bricogne bows to the dignitaries and audience after having received his honorary doctorate from Uppsala University
On January 28, 2005, Gérard Bricogne (Global Phasing Ltd, Cambridge, UK) received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala U. in Sweden in recognition of his development of fundamental crystallographic methodologies that have revolutionised the structure determination of biological macromolecules.

Bricogne has been Directeur de Recherche at LURE (Orsay, France), and has held a Howard Hughes International Research Scholarship while at LMB Cambridge. He is the recipient of numerous awards, notably the Prix Grammaticakis-Neumann of the French Academy of Sciences, the Dorothy Hodgkin Prize of the British Crystallographic Assn, and the Patterson Award of the American Crystallographic Assn. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences (Section for Mathematics) and held the 1992/93 Tage Erlander Guest Professorship of the Swedish Research Council.

He has worked on developing methods that enabled the use of non-crystallographic symmetry for protein and virus structure determination. He also worked on the theoretical underpinnings for the application of maximum likelihood methods to macromolecular crystallography.

He has founded a not-for-profit company (Global Phasing Ltd.) that is essentially devoted to carrying out his research and development work as if it were in academia. The Cambridge-based company develops innovative methods and software for the determination and refinement of macromolecular crystal structures and is supported by a consortium of pharmaceutical and drug discovery companies, and by participation in EU-funded research networks. All of the software is made freely available to academic crystallographers.

On the occasion of his visit to Uppsala in January, Dr. Bricogne (and his colleague C. Vonrhein) presented a much appreciated hands-on workshop on the use of his latest methodologies.

Previous macromolecular crystallographers who have received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala U. include Wayne Hendrickson, Michael Rossmann and Eleanor Dodson.

Gerard Kleywegt and Alwyn Jones (Uppsala U.)
10 September 2008