10 Facts About Bill Rutherford

Alfred William Rutherford is Professor and Chair in Biochemistry of Solar energy in the Department of Life sciences at Imperial College London.

Bill Rutherford was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys, Morpeth and the University of Liverpool where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry in 1976.

Bill Rutherford's research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Wolfson Foundation and the Royal Society.

Bill Rutherford was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.

Bill Rutherford has made seminal contributions that provided deep insights into the structure and function of photosynthetic reaction centres, in particular Photosystem II.

Bill Rutherford was the first to propose that PSII had the same basic structure as the simpler, non-oxygenic purple bacterial reaction centre.

Bill Rutherford went on to discover key features of PSII that differentiate it from other reaction centres.

Bill Rutherford has been awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the Medaille d'argent of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 2001 and was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2001.

On 25 January 2013 Bill Rutherford received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Bill Rutherford is a musician and has been a member of The Baskervilles Blues Band and Baskerville Willy.