Photo by Diana Rogers

SSRL Director Keith Hodgson

SSRL Director Keith O. Hodgson has been named a recipient of the Department of Energy’s Ernest O. Lawrence Award for 2002. It is the DOE’s most prestigious award.

Bestowed by the U.S. Government and presented by the Secretary of Energy, the award recognizes exceptional and relatively recent contributions to the development, use or control of nuclear energy ­- broadly defined to include the science and technology of particle, nuclear, atomic and molecular interactions.

SLAC Director Jonathan Dorfan called Hodgson, "an inspiring choice - Keith epitomizes the innovative and pioneering qualities shown by Lawrence himself."

Hodgson’s award consists of a gold medal, a citation and $25,000. The award, together with those for this year’s six other winners, will be presented at a ceremony to be held in late October in Washington, DC.

"We are all enriched by the contributions these researchers have made, ranging from understanding the genetic code to measuring the expansion of the Universe itself," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.

Hodgson’s major areas of scientific impact are in chemistry research and structural biology, for which he uses the remarkable properties of synchrotron radiation for x-ray absorption, diffraction and scattering.

"Keith Hodgson is an enormously gifted scientist," said Stanford Provost John Etchemendy. "He has distinguished himself through his own discoveries, as well as through the work of scientists whose research he has made possible. Under his leadership, SSRL has continued to develop as one of the leading facilities for analyzing the structure of biologically important proteins. His work is likely to have consequences we can only now imagine."

Hodgson’s award recognizes his seminal contributions to chemistry for the development of new methods that use synchrotron x-rays for investigating structure and function, especially in biological systems. His pioneering protein crystal diffraction studies using synchrotron radiation and his early discoveries provided the foundation for the synchrotron revolution that followed.

His research was also among the earliest to explore and demonstrate the great value of synchrotron radiation for multiple wavelength anomalous dispersion phasing, or MAD phasing, which has become a primary means of solving protein structures and which enables the high-throughput approaches critical to studies of structural genomics. He developed synchrotron-based, extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) as a unique new tool for study of the electronic and metrical details of active sites in metalloproteins.

"It is fantastic that our pioneering work in synchrotron-based science has been recognized by such an honor," said Hodgson.