The 2014 Heatley Medal and Prize was awarded to Shankar Balasubramanian from the University of Cambridge, UK. Shankar Balasubramanian is an internationally recognised leader in the field of nucleic acids who is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences. He is a principal inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing, that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology. He has made seminal contributions to the identification, elucidation and manipulation of non-coding genetic elements, particularly four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes. His work on the intervention of nucleic acid function using small molecules has revealed a number of molecular mechanisms that can be exploited, e.g., to modulate the biology of cancer.

Read Shankar's article in Biochemical Society Transactions - Decoding genomes.

The 2014 Colworth Medal was presented to M. Madan Babu. 

Read his review article published in Biochemical Society Transactions - The contribution of intrinsically disordered regions to protein function, cellular complexity, and human disease