Biography

I am a biochemist whose research career has focussed on how proteins fold or misfold to cause disease. I graduated with a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham, UK, in 1984 and completed my PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 1987. After a postdoc in the Oxford Centre for Molecular Sciences with Professor Sir Christopher Dobson, I began my independent research career in 1991 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow also at the University of Oxford. In 1995 I moved to the University of Leeds as Lecturer, establishing a research group focusing on protein folding and in 1999 was a founder member of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology. I became Professor of Structural Molecular Biology in 2000 and was appointed Astbury Professor of Biophysics in 2013 and Royal Society Professor in 2021. In 2012 - 2021 I had the honour of being Director of the Astbury Centre, a buoyant interdisciplinary Centre that aims collectively to ‘Understand Life in Molecular Detail’ (www.astbury.leeds.ac.uk). My own research focuses in two main areas: (i) the structural molecular mechanism of amyloid formation and (ii) the mechanism by which outer membrane proteins fold and assemble to create a functional outer membrane in Gram-negative bacteria. Both projects aim to discover new fundamental insights into these biological mechanisms and how to exploit these for therapeutic purposes. I have trained >83 PhD students and > 67 postdoctoral researchers, published >310 peer reviewed articles (H-index 76) and delivered >400 lectures worldwide. I was elected as fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2003), EMBO (2007), the Academy of Medical Science (2010), and the Royal Society (2014), and elected as Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to molecular biology in 2020.