Dario Alessi has won yet another award - the highly prestigious Philip Leverhulme prize to a tune of £50,000. The awarding committee congratulated Dario on "compelling recognition of research achievements". Only 24 awards are made annually by the UK trust.
This award is sixth in a clutch of recent prizes for Dario. It comes on the back of the Pfizer prize and the Young Investigator G.B.Morgani prize earlier this year for outstanding achievements in the field of metabolism.
He was elected to the Royal Society this year, was given the Eppendorf Young European scientist of the year in 2000 and the Colworth medal in 1999 for young scientists under the age of 36. Dario will use the award to further his research in the fight against diabetes.
Dr Daan van Aalten (below and right) from the school of life sciences has been named one of Europe's best - and is one of only four scientists in the UK to receive the accolade this year. He has been selected by the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) as one of 23 of the best young biomedical and life scientists in Europe.
Daan is working to identify key proteins involved in human disease, determine their 3D structures, understand their mechanisms of action at the molecular level and use this knowledge to design novel drugs against diseases such as cancer and microbial infections.
The news arrived in the same week the National Cancer Research Institute published figures showing that Dundee attracts a significantly larger share of cancer research funding than its size of University and population would expect. Dundee wins 3% - 10.5 million of the UK pot behind only the much larger research institutions in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Sir Philip Cohen has been awarded the Bristol-Myers Squibb foundation distinguished achievement award in metabolic research.
The $50,000 prize recognises his leading role in identifying how insulin accelerates the uptake of glucose from the blood and its conversion into glycogen, the major storage form of glucose in the body.
Sir Philip, who becomes the first non-American to win the award, said: "The award recognises the important work of the many outstanding research students, postdoctoral fellows and colleagues at Dundee who have cracked this problem while working in the MRC unit."
Philip started the work that led to the award in 1974, three years after he arrived in Dundee, and the project took almost 25 years to complete.
His findings suggest new approaches for the development of improved drugs to overcome the body's resistance to insulin in Type II diabetes. This disease afflicts more than three per cent of the UK population and accounts for 10 per cent of all health care expenditure. Its incidence is expected to double over the next 10 years.