The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, has announced the 2026 recipients of their annual medals and awards which honour outstanding contributions to research and scientific discovery. Kelly Nguyen, Group Leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, has received the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture, given “for her ground-breaking discoveries into the molecular mechanisms of telomere maintenance.” Awarded to biological scientists of any field within 15 years of receiving their PhD, Kelly is the sixth LMB recipient of the prestigious lecture. The award itself was endowed by Sydney Brenner, LMB Nobel Laurate and former Director, in memory of Francis Crick, with whom he worked closely with at the LMB and at its predecessor the MRC Unit for Research on the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems.
Kelly’s research is focussed on understanding the structure, maintenance and underlying mechanisms of telomeres, protective complexes which cap the ends of chromosomes. To this end, she has made several breakthroughs concerning telomerase, the enzyme which restores telomeres lost during genome replication. This includes the first ever atomic structure of human telomerase, which provided new insights into how the structure is regulated. More recently, her group revealed the atomic model of human telomerase in a dimeric form, providing definitive evidence for its existence which earlier findings had only inferred indirectly. Telomere maintenance is directly implicated in ageing-related diseases and several cancers, underlying the clinical relevance to Kelly’s work.
Kelly began her career with a PhB (honours) degree in Chemistry from the Australian National University, before moving to Cambridge for a PhD with Kiyoshi Nagai in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division. She began working on telomerase in 2016 as a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley with Kathleen Collins and Eva Nogales. She launched her independent research group at the LMB in 2019. Since then, her advancements to the field of telomerase research have been recognised with several awards, most recently the 2026 Blavatnik Award in Life Sciences, the 2025 Lister Institute Research Prize and the 2024 Colworth Medal from the Biochemical Society.
Among the other award recipients announced by the Royal Society are two former LMB Group Leaders: KJ Patel and Sarah Teichmann. KJ Patel has received the Buchanan Medal, given for his work establishing that metabolically released aldehydes are a powerful source of DNA damage and his demonstration of a two-tier protective system employed in mammals to counter this. He began this work as a Group Leader in the LMB’s PNAC Division where he launched his group in 1995. In 2021, KJ was appointed Director of the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (WIMM). Since 2022, he has also served as Chief Scientist for Cancer Research UK.
Sarah Teichmann has been awarded the Gabor Medal for her research harnessing biophysics, genomics and data science to unravel the molecular and cellular basis of living systems. She began her research group in 2001 in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division. In 2013, she left the LMB to join the Wellcome Genome Campus as the first joint appointment at EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. In 2016, she was appointed Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and co-founded the Human Cell Atlas consortium. In 2024, she relocated her group to the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, affiliated with the University of Cambridge Department of Medicine.
Further references
Royal Society press release
Kelly’s group page
KJ Patel – MRC WIMM
Sarah Teichmann LMB page
Sarah Teichmann lab site
