Clifford Paterson Prize Lecture: Weighing molecules with light

The Clifford Paterson Medal and Lecture 2026 is awarded to Professor Philipp Kukura FRS for pioneering and democratising mass photometry, a novel means of mass measurement for single biomolecules.

His lecture will discuss how the development and use of scales was critical to trade, the creation of money and thus the development of human society. Weight and mass are used somewhat interchangeably for day-to-day objects, but need to be differentiated as objects become smaller and smaller. Once we reach scales much smaller than the width of human hair, gravity is no longer the dominant force experienced by objects and can thus not be used to quantify objects by ‘weighing’ them. Instead, we need to measure their mass, which corresponds to the amount of matter in an object. Due to the difficulty of operating on the microscopic scale, only a very small number of methods have been developed to measure the mass of molecules over the past century. I will describe the development of mass photometry – a method that measures the mass of molecules and viruses by shining light at them, effectively ‘looking at them’. I will explain the principles of operation, and show how this technique is being used broadly in academia and industry to understand the basis of disease and aid in the development of next generation therapeutics.

Philipp Kukura was born in Czechoslovakia and educated in Germany, the UK, the US and Switzerland. His research focuses on the interaction of light with matter, with a particular emphasis on the development of new approaches to study biomolecules, and thereby their function and regulation. He has been part of the Chemistry faculty at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College since 2011. In 2018 he co-founded Refeyn Ltd. With Justin Benesch, Daniel Cole and Gavin Young, which has commercialised mass photometry, and acted as CEO until 2021. He is currently Professor of Chemistry at the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery at the University of Oxford focussing on next generation light-based technologies for the life sciences

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