Hugh Pelham served as director of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology between 2006 and 2018.
13 Facts About Hugh Pelham
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Hugh Pelham graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Natural Sciences followed by a PhD for research on transcription and translation in immature blood cells.
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Hugh Pelham's PhD was supervised by Richard J Jackson and Tim Hunt, who went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001.
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Hugh Pelham is an authority on the movement of proteins within cells.
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Hugh Pelham has been a visiting professor at the University of Zurich and held many posts at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he succeeded Richard Henderson to become the LMB's Director in 2006.
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Hugh Pelham has been an Honorary Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge since 2015.
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Hugh Pelham was knighted by Elizabeth II in the 2011 Birthday Honours and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1988.
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Hugh Pelham developed a sensitive in vitro translation system, with which he discovered that naturally "leaky" termination codons exist in plant virus RNAs, and achieved the first correct synthesis and processing of viral polyproteins in vitro.
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Hugh Pelham has shown that this sequence is the binding site for a transcription factor which is modified by heat shock, thus establishing the basic mechanism of induction of these genes.
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Hugh Pelham has clarified the function of heat shock proteins, finding that two of these reside in the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum.
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Hugh Pelham gave the Florey Lecture in 1992, was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998.
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Hugh Pelham won the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 1991 and the EMBO Gold Medal in 1989.
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Hugh Pelham was awarded the Colworth Medal from the Biochemical Society in 1988 and elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 1985.