The BBS Young Investigator Award was introduced in 2002 to celebrate an outstanding contribution in any area of biophysics made by a young researcher in the UK and Ireland. The award is made every two years. In 2020 the award was renamed The BBS Louise Johnson Early Career Award.
Professor Alice Pyne is a Professor of Biophysics and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the School of Chemical, Material and Biological Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering. Her research combines high-resolution atomic force microscopy (AFM) and the development of open-source image analysis tools to determine how the structural and conformational heterogeneity of individual DNA molecules affects fundamental biological processes.
She moved to the University of Sheffield from University College London, where she begun her prolific and impactful career. During her PhD she pioneered the use of AFM for obtaining structural information on DNA and started an ongoing collaboration with Bruker (the largest producer of commercial AFMs) to bring this capability to the wider user base. She was subsequently awarded EPSRC and MRC fellowships to establish her independent research group, developing new high-resolution AFM methodologies to probe DNA-protein interactions.
She is strongly motivated by open, community approaches to quantitative research and has developed ‘TopoStats” an open-source AFM analysis software and launched the AFM-SPM github community hub. TopoStats is designed to enable automated and repeatable quantitative analysis of AFM images from any manufacturer, and of any molecule, providing a high-throughput pipeline for reproducible analysis, focussed on quantitative analysis of each molecule. .
Since joining the University of Sheffield in 2019 (as Lecturer and MRC Innovation Fellow) she has established herself as a leader in the field of using AFM for DNA imaging, with her work being published in leading journals (such as Nature Communications). Her most recent publication is Quantifying complexity in DNA structures with high resolution Atomic Force Microscopy.
She is an active member in the AFM and biophysics communities. She has served as a committee member for the BBS, playing a critical role in the organisation of the Physics of Life Biennial Meeting at Harrogate in March 2025, She chairs the image analysis section (DAIM) of the Royal Microscopical Society. She is on the advisory board for the UKRI FLF Development Network and for Biophysical Reviews She has organised a number of meetings, including the first “Data Analysis in AFM” meeting, RMS AFM&SPM and MMC meetings and she chaired the 15th AFMBioMed Summer School in Sheffield in September 2025. She has contributed to the development of the 2025 Roadmap for the Physics of Life and is on the steering committee of the Physics of Life Network.
Professor Pyne said:
Receiving this award would not have been possible without the support throughout my career from all those I have worked with in academia and industry. My most recent achievements are underpinned by my amazing research group and collaborators – they are the reason we are able to do such great science
Alice’s nomination for this award was supported by Professor Jamie Hobbs, from the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sheffield, who said:
Alice has been a selfless mentor for many young scientists, helping to support them through detailed feedback on grant applications and pushing opportunities in their direction. It is hard to think of anybody else who has contributed so widely to both the biophysics community and biophysical science at such an early stage in their career.
