Gonville & Caius College Fellow Professor Ulrich Keyser has won the 2023 Sam Edwards Medal and Prize in the Institute of Physics Awards, it has been announced.

Professor Keyser was one of four researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory to be honoured by the Institute of Physics, the professional body and learned society for physics, and the leading body for practising physicists, in the UK and Ireland. Its annual awards reflect the wide variety of people, places, organisations and achievements across physics.

The award citation said of Professor Keyser received the prize “for pioneering the study of transport of structured nucleic-acid molecules through nanopores and the quantification of out-of-equilibrium polymer dynamics at the single-molecule level”.

Professor Keyser leads an interdisciplinary team of physicists, engineers, physical chemists, biochemists, and micro- and nanofabrication researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory. His research is enabling new applications in biotechnology including disease detection.

The prize is named after long-time Caius Fellow Professor Sir Sam Edwards, who died in May 2015, aged 87.