Patterson Award to Bricogne

IUCr Newsletter (1998). 6(4), 15.

G. Bricogne will be honored with the Patterson award for his fundamental analysis of structure factor statistics and implementation of optimal computational algorithms to update, sample, and evaluate accurate joint probability distributions of structure factors at any resolution given strong, phased reflections and to combine all sources of phase information with that shown by Patterson to lie within the amplitudes themselves. His most decisive accomplishments has been to transform statistical direct methods into a program for improving phase determination in the absence of atomic resolution X-ray data. Gérard was born in 1949 in Aix en Provence, France. He studied for the Ph.D. degree with D. Blow at the MRC Lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he developed the use of noncrystallographic symmetry for protein and virus structure determination. He implemented real-space averaging in new computer programs and used them in the solution of the first two virus structure determinations at atomic resolution (TMV and TBSV) with A. Klug and S. Harrison. His first independent position was at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia U., NY, where he worked from 1981-1983. He then returned to Orsay, France, to assume the position of Directeur de Recherche at L.U.R.E., where he retains an appointment. From 1993 he has worked at the MRC in Cambridge, where he holds a Howard Hughes Int'l Res. Scholarship. He is the recipient of numerous awards, notably the Prix Grammaticakis-Neumann of the French Academy of Sciences and the Dorothy Hodgkin Prize of the British Crystallographic Assn. Members of the Patterson Award Selection Committee were L. Brammer (U. of Missouri-St. Louis), Chair, H. Berman (Rutgers U.), C. Carter (U. of N. Carolina), J. Kelly (U. of Connecticut).

from the ACA Fall '98