[6] Recent research in her team includes a study, published in May 2020 by the American Chemical Society Synthetic Biology on 'Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cellular energy currency, is essential for life.
The ability to provide a constant supply of ATP is therefore crucial for the construction of artificial cells in synthetic biology' which has developed a 'minimal system for cellular respiration and energy regeneration'.
[10] In 2019, Hirst was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences[11] with the citation:Judy Hirst, Professor of Biological Chemistry at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, Cambridge, has had a definitive hand in every advance towards defining the highly complex mechanism of complex I catalysis, and has developed new physical and biochemical methods to address the elusive coupling mechanism between the redox reaction and proton translocation.
This seminal work has brought understanding that is fundamental to critical issues of health and disease on a global stage.
She is known particularly for her work on mammalian respiratory complex I (NADH: ubiquinone oxidoreductase), an energy-transducing, mitochondrial redox enzyme of fundamental and medical importance, and for solving its structure by electron cryomicroscopy.