Hugh Pelham is a cell biologist. He is an Emeritus Honorary Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge, and the former Director of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He was a student and a Fellow at Christ’s and has been an Honorary Fellow of the College since 2010.
Sir Hugh came up to Christ’s in 1972, read Natural Sciences and then did his PhD in Biochemistry and was elected as a Research Fellow. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore, Maryland, USA before returning to Cambridge to join the staff of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1981. He was Head of the Cell Biology Division 1992-2006, Deputy Director 1996–2006, then Director 2006–18. He was elected Honorary Professor of Molecular Biology at Cambridge in 2015, retiring in 2020 and holding the Emeritus title since 2021.
His research has contributed to the understanding of the body’s response to rises in temperature through the synthesis of so-called ‘heat shock proteins’. He is also one of the foremost authorities on the movement of proteins within cells. He has published numerous papers in scientific journals on molecular and cell biology and served on many editorial boards. He was elected a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 1985, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1988, and was a founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998. He has received a number of scientific awards, including the EMBO gold medal, the Royal Society Croonian Lecture and medal, the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the King Faisal International Prize for Science, and was awarded a Knighthood for services to science in 2011.