Kai Johnsson wins the Karl Heinz Beckurts Prize 2016
©Karl Heinz Beckurts-Stiftung (KHBS)/Martin Hangen
Professor Kai Johnsson has won the Karl Heinz Beckurts Prize 2016 in Germany.
The Karl Heinz Beckurts Foundation (Karl Heinz Beckurts-Stiftung) awards the Prize each year to honor “outstanding scientific and technical achievementswhich also become economically significant”. The Foundation was founded in 1987 by the Helmholtz Association in memory of Professor Karl Heinz Beckurts, a German nuclear physicist who was assassinated the year before.
This year’s Karl Heinz Beckurts Prize has been awarded to Professor Kai Johnsson, who directs EPFL’s Laboratory of Protein Engineering. He is considered to be one of the most creative and innovative experts in the field of chemical biology, having developed a number of new protein-labeling techniques for bioimaging, all of which have proven to be commercially successful and are marketed by New England Biolabs and Spirochrome SA, and have become indispensable for biomedical imaging worldwide.
Through targeted modification of proteins, the group of Kai Johnsson has also succeeded in creating new protein-based biosensors for use in diagnostics. He has also helped elucidate the mechanisms of action of several drugs, and is involved in the development of new drugs for chronic pain through the start-up Quartet Medicines.
“Kai Johnsson combines excellent basic research with entrepreneurial initiative and farsightedness. For his outstanding achievements, we would like to award him the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award 2016,” says Professor Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla, scientific director of the Helmholtz Center Berlin and chairman of the Karl Heinz Beckurts Foundation.
“As a person, Karl Heinz Beckurts embodied the partnership between science and business, and used it early on to implement scientific knowledge in business. As both who is a researcher and entrepreneur, Professor Johnsson is a worthy prizewinner,” says Professor Siegfried Russwurm, a member of the Management Board of Siemens AG and a member of the Board of the Karl Heinz Beckurts Foundation.
The prize, endowed with 30,000 euros, was presented at the new Siemens headquarters in Munich as part of a gala dinner on December 5th.