Enrico Coen: the 2016 BSDB Waddington medal winner

The BSDB is delighted to announce Enrico Coen CBE FRS (John Innes Centre, Norwich) as the 2016 winner of theWaddington Medal. Professor Coen was awarded the medal for his pioneering contributions to understanding patterning and morphogenesis in plants, particularly snap dragon flowers. His work elegantly combines molecular genetics, diverse imaging techniques and computational modeling (see the Coen lab site). He is also well known for his popular science books ‘The art of genes’ (1999) and ‘Cells to civilisations’ (2012), and his painting, which has appeared on the cover of Cell and the walls of the Royal Society.

The medal talk was a pleasure to watch and is now available on YouTube. It was a scholarly masterpiece of conceptual brilliance, presented with inspiring enthusiasm, enriched with beautiful images, illustrated with enlightening and entertaining movies of pottery (!!!) and computer models, and even spiced up with live experiments.It will soon be available on the BSDB’s YouTube channel. An interview performed by Cat Vicente during the Spring meeting is scheduled to be published in Development.