Royal Society Research Fellowship winner - Professor Bill Rutherford

Professor Bill Rutherford of Imperial's Department of Life Sciences has been awarded the highly prestigious Royal Society Research Fellowship.

Royal Society Professorship 

The professorship, which the Royal Society describes as its 'premier research award', serves to 'provide long-term support for internationally recognised scientists of exceptional accomplishments, helping release them from competing duties, such as teaching and administration, allowing them to focus on ambitious and original research of the highest quality.' Only two awards were made this year, which makes this achievement all the more impressive.  

Professor Rutherford’s research 

Professor Rutherford aims to understand the complex enzymes that convert solar energy to chemical energy in photosynthesis. He works on both of the light-driven enzymes of oxygenic photosynthesis, their structures, mechanisms and evolutionary relationships with other photosynthetic reaction centres. He is interested in energy accounting in photosynthesis and other energy converting processes in biology: i.e., the field of bioenergetics.

His research focuses on the chemical and physical mechanisms of photosynthesis at the scale of photons, electrons and protons, the organic and metal cofactors, and the proteins that control their reactions. His work is also relevant to the climate crisis, in terms of the efficiency of crop production, as a benchmark and source of design features for artificial photosynthesis, for understanding energy in the biosphere, coral bleaching, and the validity (or lack thereof) of mitigation policies involving bioenergy. 

Professor Rutherford on his award 

Professor Rutherford said: “I am happy, honoured, and relieved to be awarded a Royal Society Research Professorship. This success owes a lot to my excellent coworkers, post docs, students, and network of collaborators here and abroad. The professorship will provide me with the time to think and the resources to work with my team on our favorite research projects: the light-driven enzymes pf photosynthesis, “the photosystems”. These chlorophyll-containing (chlorofilled?) proteins put the energy into biosphere, the oxygen into the atmosphere (making complex life possible) and thus changed the planet.  

Despite the long history of biophysical research in photosynthesis, we are still regularly turning up surprises that make us reassess some fundamental concepts. Our discovery of photosystems able to do the same light-driven chemistry but using lower energy light (far-red/near-infrared), initiated a new phase of research in photosynthesis. This new impetus was not just because these photosystems are more efficient, but also because the research gives new insights to understanding conventional photosynthesis. Both aspects have potential benefits for agronomy and (photo)biotechnologies.  

Currently the field is being revolutionized by cryo-electron microscopy, which, when combined with computational chemistry and spectroscopy, allows mechanistic questions at the heart of molecular bioenergetics to be solved with unprecedented chemical detail. Our plan is to do more of that. But all those fancy methods would be worthless if the samples were poor. So, back to the benches and the basics, Team, the biochem comes first.”