The Hooke Medal

The medal is presented at the annual Spring meeting. The medal is to be awarded annually to an emerging leader in cell biology. The award is made to someone who has made an outstanding contribution to UK Cell Biology usually within the first 10 years of establishing their own lab. 

The BSCB invites nominations for next year’s Hooke Medal from any BSCB member and these should be sent, with a supporting statement (inc key pubs) outlining why the person nominated would be a suitable recipient of the Hooke medal and the name of seconder (can be any BSCB member), to the Secretary at any time.

The medal shows Robert Hooke’s microscope and the cork cells he first described. It was designed by Dr Brad Amos.

Hooke Medal Winner 2013 – Eric Miska

This year’s Hooke Medal winner is Eric Miska from the Gurdon Institute, Cambridge.

The Hooke medal is awarded each year to an outstanding UK cell biologist who has been working as an independent research scientist for less than 10 years. Previous winners have included scientists such as Ann Ridley, Matthew Freeman, Alex Gould and last year’s winner Holger Gerhardt..

Eric Miska has been an independent researcher since 2005. He and his team are investigating all aspects of gene regulation by regulatory RNA. Dr. Miska played an important role in the initial understanding of the role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in Caenorhabditis elegans by knocking out all miRNAs and investigating the phenotypes of individual mutants as well as double and triple mutants. In the last few years he has increasingly focussed on the biogenesis and function of another class of small non-coding RNAs the so-called piRNAs, which are bound to the PIWI protein. Dr. Miska has published a number of important papers dealing with aspects of regulatory RNA and his work has been at the forefront of this dynamic area of research.

Eric will be presented with his medal and will give the Hooke medal lecture at the BSCB/BSDB Spring meeting in March next year.

Previous winners of the Hooke Medal