Biography: Professor John Schwabe is Professor of Structural Biology and Director of the Leicester Institute of Structural and Chemical Biology, at the University of Leicester in the UK. He studied Biochemistry at University College, University of Oxford and obtained his PhD at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. He received the Max Perutz Prize for his doctoral research in 1991. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge until he joined joined the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, La Jolla, California as a staff scientist. In 1997, he returned to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge as a Group Leader/Senior Scientist until moving to Leicester in 2006. John Schwabe has recently been elected to the Academia Europaea. He holds a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award and a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award.