Tilden Prize 2011 Winner
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Award for his outstanding contributions to understanding the Origins of Life through your seminal synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides under potentially prebiotic conditions.
About the Winner
John Sutherland studied chemistry at the University of Oxford under the tutelage of Peter Atkins and Gordon Lowe, and then spent a spell as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard with Jeremy Knowles.
Upon return to the UK, he carried out his doctoral work with Jack Baldwin at Oxford, and then stayed in Oxford first as a Junior Research Fellow and then as a University Lecturer in Organic Chemistry.
In 1998 he took a chair in Biological Chemistry at Manchester, and in 2010 moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge as a Group Leader. He is interested in chemistry associated with the origin of life, and in evolution.
His research group has made contributions in the area of prebiotic nucleotide synthesis and RNA chemistry.
