It is a pleasure to be able to celebrate the winners of the Cranfield Awards named in honor of a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of General Physiology, Paul Cranefield. These are awarded for the best papers published in JGP by early-career authors. This year’s awards are for papers published in 2022, and the winners were selected by a committee chaired by Alessio Accardi representing both JGP and the Society of General Physiologists. The awards are made to researchers at three different career stages.
The Cranefield Graduate Student Award has been awarded to Nicole Godellas from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Working towards her PhD under the mentorship of Claudio Grossman, she produced a combined theoretical and practical analysis of ligand binding to channels (Godellas and Grosman, 2022).
The Cranefield Postdoctoral Award was won by Krishna Reddy for work carried out at Weill Cornell Medicine with Olga Boudker and colleagues on the heterogeneity of glutamate binding to an archaeal transporter (Reddy et al., 2022).
The Senior Cranefield Award is for work undertaken by someone at the start of an independent research career, and has been awarded to Ivy Dick (University of Maryland) for work analyzing the diversity of the mechanisms by which mutations in CaV1.2 result in disease (Bamgboye et al., 2022).
Not only is it important to be able to celebrate the quality of the science of these awardees, but it is also satisfying to see that the winners represent the breadth of work published in JGP, ranging from unicellular organisms though to the mechanisms of human disease.
