Professor Shechtman is the Philip Tobias distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology as well as Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University.
While on sabbatical at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he discovered the Icosahedral Phase which opened the new science of quasiperiodic crystals. In 2011, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals.
Professor Balasubramanian has been a Cambridge academic and Fellow of Trinity College since 1994 and is an expert in the study of nucleic acids.
He is the co-inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology which has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality. He created Solexa sequencing and co-founded the biotech company Solexa to commercialise the technology, and has remained a senior advisor to Solexa over the past decade.