Royal honor for CFEL scientist Henry Chapman

DESY scientist Henry Chapman at CFEL has received the 2021 Gregori Aminoff Prize for Crystallography from the hands of Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf on Monday. Aminoff Prize winners from three years were honored at the ceremony in Stockholm's City Hall, where the annual Nobel Prize banquet is also held. Because of the Corona pandemic, the presentation had to be postponed each time.

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DESY scientist Henry Chapman received the Prize diploma from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf. Credit: KVA, Markus Marcetic

Chapman, who is also a professor at the University of Hamburg and a member of the Hamburg Cluster of Excellence CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter, was awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences together with Janos Hajdu from the University of Uppsala and John Spence from Arizona State University “for pioneering contributions to the development of structural biology at free-electron X-ray lasers”. John Spence had passed away in June 2021.

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The winners of the Aminoff Prize (to the left) and the Sjöberg Prize for cancer research (to the right) were honored together. Credit: KVA, Markus Marcetic

Chapman and Hajdu were joined by the prize winners of 2020, Douglas C. Rees from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Jian-Ren Shen from Okayama University in Japan, and 2022, Elena Conti from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Planegg Patrick Cramer from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and Seth Darst from Rockefeller University in New York.

The award, named after the Swedish mineralogist and artist Gregori Aminoff, is endowed with 80 000 Swedish crowns (about 7500 euros). It has been awarded since 1979 for outstanding achievements in crystallography. The award ceremony takes place at the annual celebration of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.