Research Theme Champion
About: I carried out my PhD research in protein folding at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering (Cambridge, UK) in the lab of Alan Fersht. I then moved to work with Richard Bayliss on protein kinases at the Institute of Cancer Research, before a second postdoc in spectroscopy, microscopy and magnetoreception with Mark Wallace and Peter Hore at University of Oxford (where I also held a Fulford Junior Research Fellowship at Somerville College). In 2013 I won an Imperial College Research Fellowship to apply single molecule techniques to protein kinases and start my own research group at Imperial College London. I have worked in biophysics, structural biology, chemistry and biomedical departments before moving to Pharmacy & Pharmacology (now part of Life Sciences) at University of Bath in 2018.
Their research: Working at the interface of the biological and physical sciences, we use single molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and other techniques to measure changes in the conformation of protein drug targets with the ultimate aim of using our results to improve drug discovery. Our approach enables us to detect and quantify multiple populations in solution and to observe transient occupation of minority states directly. In particular, we specialise in measuring small distance changes and conformational changes in small proteins using dye quenching.