Wendy Bickmore is an outstanding scientist of major international standing, working on nuclear organisation and its relationship to the control of gene expression, which is of critical relevance to biology and medicine. With the growing availability of information on genome sequence and organisation from multiple species the live-cell tagging methodology developed by Dr Bickmore to visualise gene and chromatin movements within living cells and tissues is making enormous impact on our understanding of the four dimensional (3D plus time) regulation of gene expression, for example as ES cells differentiate (see Chambeyron and Bickmore Genes and Development 18, 1119-113-, 2004). This widely heralded paper is the current culmination of the steady technical development and biological analysis over the past decade in Dr Bickmore’s lab. A very different top-down approach was developed for the analysis of chromatin organisation recently described in her Cell paper. 11 high level publications have been added to list since last year. In addition her group has also established a gene trap approach to identify critical new genes with a role in nuclear function and set up a useful publicly available database describing key nuclear genes whose function is gradually being unravelled. In 1999 Wendy Bickmore was one of 10 young scientists awarded the $1 million James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship. Since then she was elected an EMBO member and this year appointed Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University and in 2005 she receives the Tenovus Medal. As a complement to lab work, she has initiated, and participated in, many public events to disseminate wider understanding of modern scientific aims and approaches, mostly to young audiences. Dr Bickmore is a stellar young candidate for the Academy of Medical Sciences, with work of great importance for understanding, and ultimately treating, the underlying abnormalities in cancer, imprinting diseases and conditions with disruption of chromatin organisation.