The 2014 Heatley Medal and Prize was awarded to Shankar Balasubramanian from the University of Cambridge, UK. Shankar Balasubramanian is an internationally recognised leader in the field of nucleic acids who is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences. He is a principal inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing, that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology. He has made seminal contributions to the identification, elucidation and manipulation of non-coding genetic elements, particularly four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes. His work on the intervention of nucleic acid function using small molecules has revealed a number of molecular mechanisms that can be exploited, e.g., to modulate the biology of cancer.

Read Shankar's article in Biochemical Society Transactions - Decoding genomes.

The 2014 Centenary Award was presented to Professor Susan Taylor from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California San Diego, USA. Susan has made fundamental and pioneering contributions to understanding the structure and function of protein kinases. Susan received her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin and her PhD in Physiological Chemistry from the Johns Hopkins University. She did her postdoctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular
Biology in Cambridge with Brian Hartley and then went to the newly founded University of San Diego, first as a postdoctoral fellow with Nathan Kaplan and then rising through the ranks to the level of Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and of Pharmacology. She is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Her research on the structure and function of cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) led to her solving the crystal structure of the first protein kinase in 1991. The PKA catalytic subunit has served as the prototype for the entire protein kinase superfamily that regulates so many biological processes. Her subsequent structures of the PKA regulatory subunits and most recently of full-length tetrameric holoenzymes show how a large macromolecular signalling complex is assembled at specific sites in the cell.

The 2014 Colworth Medal was presented to M. Madan Babu. 

Read his review article published in Biochemical Society Transactions - The contribution of intrinsically disordered regions to protein function, cellular complexity, and human disease