Ben Davis got his B.A. (1993) and D.Phil. (1996) from the University of Oxford. During this time he learned the beauty of carbohydrate chemistry under the supervision of Professor George Fleet. He then spent 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Bryan Jones at the University of Toronto, exploring protein chemistry and biocatalysis. In 1998 he returned to the U.K. to take up a lectureship at the University of Durham. In the autumn of 2001 he moved to the Dyson Perrins Laboratory, University of Oxford and received a fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford. His group's research centers on chemical biology with an emphasis on carbohydrates and proteins. In particular, the group's interests encompass synthesis and methodology, inhibitor design, protein engineering, drug delivery, molecular modeling, molecular biology, and glycoscience. This work has received the 1999 RSC Meldola medal and prize, the 2001 RSC Carbohydrate Award sponsored by Syngenta, an AstraZeneca Strategic Research Award, a DTI Smart Award, a Mitzutani Foundation for Glycoscience Award, the 2002 Philip Leverhulme Prize, the 2005 Royal Society Mullard Prize and Medal, the RSC 2005 Corday-Morgan Medal, the 2006 International Association for Protein Structure Analysis and Proteomics Young Investigator Award, the 2008 Wain Medal for Chemical Biology, and in 2008 he was the first UK recipient of the American Chemical Society's Horace S. Isbell Award. In 2005 he was elected the UK representative and secretary of the European Carbohydrate Organisation and in 2011 the President of the RSC Chemical Biology Division. He sits (has sat) on the Editorial Boards of Carbohydrate Research (2005-), Chemical Biology and Drug Design (2006-), Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry (2006-2011) and the Biochemical Journal (2009-). He is also (or has) been appointed to the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Biochemical Journal (2002-2005), Chemical Science (2010-) and ChemBioChem (from 2011). From 2011 he will be the Editor-in-Chief of Current Opinion in Chemical Biology. Ben Davis was co-founder of Glycoform, a biotechnology company that from 2002-2011 investigated the therapeutic potential of synthetic glycoproteins and of Oxford Contrast a company investigating the use of molecular imaging for brain disease. In 2003 he has been named as among the 100 top young innovators in the world by Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s magazine of innovation. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Elsevier Carbohydrate Research Award for Creativity in Carbohydrate Chemistry, he held a Novartis Lectureship Award, was the first recipient of the RSC Norman Heatley Award (for inter- and multi-disciplinary research between chemistry and the life sciences), held the 2009 Jones Lectureship of the University of Toronto and was given a Wolfson Research Merit Award by the Royal Society. In 2010 he was a finalist in the BBSRC Innovator of the Year competition and received the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan, (SSOCJ) Lectureship Award. He has recently been awarded with the 2011 Hirst Lectureship of the University of St Andrews, the 2011 Boehringer Ingelheim Lectureship of the University of Alberta and in 2012 will be the first UK recipient of the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award for Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry.