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The BPS Lecturer receives the Biophysical Society's highest honor. The award is given each year to an outstanding biophysicist who presents the BPS Lecture at the Annual Meeting.

Past BPS Lecturers

1969 The Study of Macromolecules by Fluorescence Methods
Gregorio Weber
1970 Phycomyces, Work in Progress
Max Delbruck
1971 Inhibitory Interaction in the Retina of Limulus
H. K. Hartline
1972 Mapping Active Sites of Enzymes by Magnetic Resonance Methods
Mildred Cohn
1973 The Structure and Biosynthesis of  Closed Circular DNA
Jerome Vinograd
1974 Mapping Genetic Sequences by Electron Microscopy
Norman Davidson
1975 The Molecular Biology of Brain Cell Interactions
Francis O. Schmitt
1976 Actomyosin ATPase and the Mechanism of Muscle Contraction
Edwin W. Taylor
1977 Neurogenetics of Behavior in Drosophila
Seymour Benzer
1978 Astronomy and Biology: Some Connections
Carl Sagan
1979 The Golden Age of Cell Biology: Its Origins and Its Future
Keith Porter
1980 Science and the American Future
Philip Handler
1981 Structure and Motion in Proteins
Frederic M. Richards
1982 Cell Adhesion Molecules
Gerald M. Edelman
1983 Bacterial Photosynthesis
George Feher
1984 Mechanisms of Protein Integration into Membranes
Günter Blobel
1985 Switching in Protein Assemblies
Donald L. D. Caspar
1986 Leeuwenhoek, Huygens, and the Future of Biophysics
Shinya Inoue
1987 Light and Life
Lubert Stryer
1988 Electrophoresis of DNA
Bruno Zimm
1989 Exploring How Viruses Initiate Infections and How the Immune System Responds
Using Molecular Biophysics

Don C. Wiley
1990 Molecular Tools to Elucidate Problems in Excitation-Contraction Coupling
David H. MacLennan
1991 Molecular Dynamics: Its Role in Biophysics
Martin Karplus
1992 Looking at Proteins
Jane S. Richardson
1993 Recognition of DNA by Zinc-Finger and Other Proteins Involved in the Regulation of
Gene Expression

Aaron Klug
1994 Flexing and Folding the DNA Double Helix
Wilma K. Olson
1995 Mechanism of Action of a Molecular Motor
James  A. Spudich
1996 Protein Folding: A Very Simple Perspective
Ken A. Dill
1997 Diphtheria Toxin and Domain Swapping: A Strange Biophysical Tail
David Eisenberg
1998 The Structural Basis of Protein Folding and Misfolding
Christopher M. Dobson
1999 Protein Folding and Human Disease
Jeffery W. Kelly
2000 Structure and Dynamics of Camp-dependent Protein Kinase
Susan Taylor
2001 Structure Isn’t Everything But It Sure Helps
Brian W. Matthews
2002 Multiphoton Imaging the Molecular Dynamics of Living
Watt W. Webb
2003 From Protein Structure to Biological Function and Evolution
Janet Thornton
2004 Atomic Basis of Ion Channel Function
Roderick MacKinnon
2005 Cryo-Electron Microscopy of the Ribosome: Glimpses of a Molecular Machine in Motion
Joachim Frank
2006 Probing Nature’s Nanoscale Machines with Microscale Probes
Kazuhiko Kinosita, Jr.
2007 Ion Pumping by Ca-ATPase of the Sarcoplasmic Reticulum – A Structural View
Chikashi Toyoshima
2008 The Molecular Basis of Eukaryotic Transcription
Roger Kornberg
2009 Proteins in Action: Dynamics during Catalysis and Signaling
Dorothee Kern
2010 Breeding and Building Molecules to Spy on Cells in Health and Disease
Roger Tsien
2011 Chaperonin-Mediated Protein Folding
Arthur L. Horwich
2012 Shedding Light on Single Molecules
Steven M. Block
2013 The Making and Breaking of Nucleosomes
Karolin Luger
2014  A Journey Through Cellular Processes: One Molecule at a Time
Carlos Bustamante
2015  Discoveries in Biophysics Through the Computational Microscope
Klaus Schulten
2016 Molecular Movies: Feature-Length Simulations of Protein Dynamics
David E. Shaw
2017 Imaging Cellular Structure and Dynamics from Molecules to Organisms
Eric Betzig
2018 CRISPR Systems: Biology and Application of Gene Editing
Jennifer Doudna
2019 From Peripheral Proteins to Membrane Motors – Mass Spectrometry Comes of Age
Carol Robinson
2020

From Single-Molecule Biophysics to Single-Cell Genomics: When Stochasticity Meets Precision

Sunney Xie

2021

Visualizing Structure, Dynamics and Interactions of Complex Macromolecular Assemblies

Eva Nogales

2022 Innovation by Evolution: Bringing New Chemistry to Life
Frances Arnold
2023 How do you feel? The Molecules that Sense Touch
Ardem Patapoutian
2024 Therapeutic Opportunities in Glyoscience
Carolyn Bertozzi