Royal honour for Henry Chapman

13 June 2022

Photo: KVA, Markus Marcetic

Henry Chapman received the Prize diploma from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf.

Henry Chapman has received the 2021 Gregori Aminoff Prize for Crystallography from the hands of Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf. Aminoff Prize winners from three years were honoured 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.

Chapman, who is a lead scienstist at DESY, a professor at Universität Hamburg and a spokesperson of the 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. 

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. Text: DESY, ed.

Homepage of the Gregori Aminoff Prize at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

More information abour Spence's, Chapman's and Hajdu's ressearch: Amonoff Prize for Henry Chapman, 9-14-2020