Dario Alessi has won the 1999 Colworth Medal of the Biochemical Society, which is awarded annually to a British Biochemist under the age of 35. The award was made in recognition of his groundbreaking work on insulin signalling, culminating in the discovery of 3-phosphoinositide-dependent protein kinase-1 (PDK1). Dario presented his Colworth Lecture and received the medal and cheque for £1,000 from Sir Philip Randle, the President of the Biochemical Society, at a joint meeting of the Biochemical Society and Royal Society of Chemistry held at the University of Bath on September 5th 2000. He repeated the Lecture on November 15th 2000 at the Colworth House Laboratories in Bedfordshire (the UK headquarters of Uniliver who donate the medal and prize). At 32, Dario was the youngest of the 38 recipients of the award.

This is the fourth time that the Colworth Medal has been won by a scientist from the Unit. Nicholas Tonks (now at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York), who was a PhD student in the Unit from 1982-1985, won The 1993 Colworth Medal, while David Barford won the 1998 Colworth Medal for research he initiated during a year he spent with Tricia Cohen in the Unit in 1991. Sir Philip Cohen, Director of the Unit, won the 1977 Colworth Medal.