Sascha Duttke Wins 2014-15 Kamen Prize

December 22, 2015

By Kim McDonald

Sascha Duttke

Sascha Duttke, a doctoral student in the laboratory of Jim Kadonaga, a biology professor, and Olivia Kim, a doctoral student in the laboratory of Andy McCammon, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, have each won the 2014-2015 Kamen Prize.

The prize was established in 1978 by the friends and family of Martin Kamen, a former chemistry professor, to recognize the outstanding thesis in biochemistry defended each year at UC San Diego. A cash prize of $1,500 will be awarded to each recipient and each will separately present Martin D. Kamen Lectures.

The two were selected from nominees from the Division of Biological Sciences and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry by a selection committee that “was greatly impressed with the consistent, excellent quality of the submitted dissertations.”

Duttke was cited for his Ph.D. thesis on "Integrating conformational and protonation equilibria in biomolecular modeling."

Martin D. Kamen was an emeritus chemistry professor at UC San Diego. He was the co-discoverer of carbon 14 while at UC Berkeley in the early 1940s and came to UC San Diego in 1960, where he continued important work on photosynthetic transport proteins until his retirement. He passed away in 2002.