Senior Group Leader Rado Enchev, last year's winner of the Sir David Cooksey Prize in Translation, gives this week's Crick Lecture as part of the 2026 Cooksey Prize awards ceremony.
Rado Enchev was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. He studied molecular biotechnology in Heidelberg and carried out extensive undergraduate research, reconstructing and modelling the connectivity of neural circuits with Moritz Helmstädter and Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute of Medical Research.
For his PhD Rado joined the group of Ed Morris at the Institute of Cancer Research to undertake molecular and structural studies of a key regulator of the ubiquitin-proteasome system with a particular focus on cryo-electron microscopy. This led on to a productive collaboration with Brenda Schulman.
Rado did a postdoc in Matthias Peter’s group at the ETH in Zürich, and conducted further in-depth biochemical, biophysical and structural studies of the ubiquitin proteasome system, in particular in a collaboration with Ray Deshaies. He joined the Crick as an Early Career Group Leader in 2018 and leads the Visual Biochemistry Laboratory.
Rado and his team have delivered a technology step-change in structural biology: developing an end-to-end, time-resolved cryo-EM workflow that makes millisecond capture of transient molecular states reproducible and facility-compatible. The platform hardware - the “Chronobot” system - mixes reactants, imposes precise delays and vitrifies with AI-guided control of ice quality and grid yield; massively reducing the levels of sample wastage once synonymous with cryo-EM, and opening the door to dynamic cryo-imaging at unprecedented scale. Once bespoke, this platform now forms a bookable capability that a core facility can run to specification. A first-generation automated unit has been installed and validated at the Crick, with feedback from academic and industrial pilots being integrated into a second-generation design intended as an initial production unit for deployment at multiple sites.
