Spiers Memorial Award 2010 winner
University of California, San Diego, USA
Awarded for his outstanding contributions to the creation of fluorescent proteins and their applications in chemistry, physics and the life sciences.
About the winner
Roger Y. Tsien, born in 1952, received his A.B. in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College in 1972. He received his Ph.D. in Physiology in 1977 from the University of Cambridge and remained as a Research Fellow until 1981. He then became an Assistant, Associate, then full Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1989 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor in the Depts. of Pharmacology and of Chemistry & Biochemistry.
His honors include First Prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (1968), Searle Scholar Award (1983), Artois-Baillet-Latour Health Prize (1995), Gairdner Foundation International Award (1995), Award for Creative Invention from the American Chemical Society (2002), Heineken Prize in Biochemistry and Biophysics (2002), and shares of the Wolf Prize in Medicine (2004), Rosenstiel Award (2006), E.B. Wilson Medal of the American Society for Cell Biology (2008), and Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2008). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society.
Dr. Tsien is best known for building molecules that report or perturb signal transduction inside living cells. These molecules, created by organic synthesis or by engineering naturally fluorescent proteins, have enabled many new insights into signaling via calcium, sodium, pH, cyclic nucleotides, nitric oxide, inositol polyphosphates, membrane and redox potential changes, protein phosphorylation, active export of proteins from the nucleus, and gene transcription. He is now developing new ways to target contrast agents and therapeutic agents to tumors and other sites of extracellular protease activity.
