Judy Hirst facts for kids

Judy Hirst is a British scientist who studies tiny parts of our cells called mitochondria. She leads the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit at the University of Cambridge.

Growing Up and School

Judy Hirst grew up in a village called Lepton, near Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, England. She went to King James's School and Greenhead College.

University Studies

She studied chemistry at St John's College, Oxford, earning a Master of Arts degree. Later, in 1997, she received her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree from Lincoln College, Oxford. Her Ph.D. research focused on how electrons move in special proteins called enzymes. Her supervisor was Fraser Armstrong.

Her Scientific Career

After finishing her Ph.D., Dr. Hirst worked as a fellow at the Scripps Research Institute in California. Later, she moved to Cambridge, England.

Leading Research

As of 2023, Dr. Hirst is a professor and Director of Studies in Natural Sciences Chemistry at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Since 2020, she has been the director of the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit. Before that, she was the assistant director from 2011 to 2014 and deputy director from 2014 to 2020.

Her main research is about something called mitochondrial complex I. This is a very important part of mitochondria, which are like the powerhouses of our cells.

Key Discoveries

Dr. Hirst has published many important research papers. In 2018, she wrote about "respiratory chain supercomplexes." These are groups of proteins that work together in mitochondria. She also worked with Justin Fedor on research about mitochondrial supercomplexes, published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

More recently, in May 2020, her team published a study in American Chemical Society Synthetic Biology. This research looked at how cells make energy using something called ATP (adenosine triphosphate). ATP is super important for life. Her team developed a simple system to understand how cells breathe and make energy. This helps scientists build artificial cells.

Awards and Recognitions

Early in her career, Judy Hirst received several awards. In 2001, she won the EMBO Young Investigator Award. In 2006, she received the Young Investigator Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Major Honours

In 2018, Dr. Hirst was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). This is a very high honour for scientists in the UK. In the same year, she also received an Interdisciplinary Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

In 2019, she became a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. This award recognized her important work on mitochondrial complex I. Her research helped explain how this complex works and how problems with it can affect our health. She also discovered how a medicine called metformin affects complex I.

Keilin Memorial Lecture

In 2020, Dr. Hirst was given the Keilin Memorial Lecture and Medal. This award was for her amazing contributions to understanding how enzymes convert energy. She helped figure out how these enzymes use energy from chemical reactions to move protons across cell membranes. Her work on mammalian respiratory complex I is especially well-known. She even helped solve its structure using a special microscope technique called electron cryomicroscopy.