Profile

I spend most of my time teaching chemistry at the University of Leeds but my background is as a chemist designing and making new medicines. I’m still interested in this area and I work with Leeds undergraduates who do projects with me as part of their training.

Mother Nature is brilliant at making molecules that have shapes and arrangements of atoms that make good medicines. In fact most of the medicines we use are based on chemical structures found in natural compounds including of aspirin (headaches) and penicillin (antibiotics).

This is a YouTube video that I made to explain how a breast cancer medicine made by a sea sponge was discovered https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIM5YwN-ceA&feature=youtu.be

Most of the time, the plants or animals that make these compounds don’t make a lot of it, so my job as a chemist is to make large amounts of the substance so there’s enough to do further tests and treat people. I do this by taking simple building blocks of atoms and building the chemical structure until it matches the natural compound. If it sounds like Lego, that’s because it’s a lot like Lego!

I worked on a cancer research project making a compound that a sea sponge made which was really active against all types of cancer. I am working with other scientists on this and together we’ve made most of the building blocks so far – we just need to join them together now.

I’m also starting a new project where I’m trying to copy the way nature makes these types of molecules which it does in two steps: step 1 – make the carbon skeletons; step 2 – add oxygens and nitrogens. This will hopefully lead to new molecules with weird and wonderful shapes which could be used for a range of diseases.

The amount I teach in a day varies but I plan my lectures or tutorials in advance. I sometime will go and supervise students in our labs who are training how to carry out experiments. If I have any work to mark, I’ll also do that.

In between teaching I fit in the time to work on my research. I’ll talk to my project students, find out what’s happened and we share ideas of what to do next with the projects. As well as being used to discover new medicines, these projects are really important for training new scientists who will becomes experts in discovery medicine. I find this part just as rewarding as the project themselves.