Eleanor Dodson

Eleanor Dodson was an Australian-born crystallographer and biochemist who developed methods and software for determining the structures of proteins and other biological molecules. She was a professor at the University of York and a fellow of the Royal Society. She was born in 1928 in Adelaide, South Australia, to a family of musicians. She attended Frensham School in Mittagong before studying medicine at the University of Adelaide and graduating in 1946. She worked as an obstetrician at St Joseph's Hospital and St George's Hospital before marrying Herbert Dodson, a biochemist and crystallographer who worked at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. In 1954, they moved to England and Eleanor joined her husband's research group at the NIMR. She learned crystallography from Max Perutz and John Kendrew, who later won the Nobel Prize for their work on haemoglobin and myoglobin. She also collaborated with Dorothy Hodgkin, another Nobel laureate, on the structure of insulin. In 1969, she moved to the University of York with her husband, where they established a crystallography laboratory. She became a lecturer in 1976 and a professor in 1998. She worked on many challenging protein structures, such as ribonuclease, lysozyme, penicillin-binding proteins, and HIV protease. She also made significant contributions to the theory and practice of crystallography, developing methods for molecular replacement, phasing, refinement, and validation. She wrote many programs that are widely used by crystallographers around the world, such as MOLREP, REFMAC, SFCHECK, and ACORN. She was also involved in the Collaborative Computational Project Number 4 (CCP4), which provides a suite of software tools for macromolecular crystallography. She received many awards and honours for her work, including the Ewald Prize (2005), the Dorothy Hodgkin Prize (2008), the Royal Medal (2012), and the Order of Australia (2017). She died in 2020 at her home in York at the age of 92.