The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is required in advance.
A drinks reception will take place following the lecture.
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Abstract
We are astonishing miracles of molecular complexity. And yet, through that complexity comes the ability to direct the simplest everyday movements that sustain all life on Earth. So how do we, and all living things, move? What underpins biological motion?
Zooming in, from living organism, to tissues, cells, and down to atomic and electronic dimensions – we find protein molecules that keep life moving. However explaining exactly how these complex molecules do their jobs has proved difficult without understanding their arrangement of atoms and electrons and how these structures change during the act of movement.
Biography
Jasper van Thor has always been motivated by a single idea – to understand how life actually works. Jasper is now part of a global community of scientists peering into this tiny world of extremely fast moving reactions, and firing intensely bright pulses of light to stimulate and photograph the engine rooms of life in action. Where we previously relied on static images taken before and after a reaction, and simulations to infer what might have happened in the middle, by capturing trillions to almost quadrillions of images per second Jasper’s several techniques are producing the first ever motion picture movies of the protein chemical reaction behind fundamental process like photosynthesis and vision, in real time.
As the field ramps up with new accelerator facilities opening up around the world, providing micro-molecular movie making equipment to a new generation of scientists, Jasper’s inaugural lecture will discuss his own story so far. It’s one that starts with a teenager discovering Isaac Newton and his laws of motions, and journeys towards new ways to illuminate the mechanisms behind the chemistry of life.
Jasper van Thor was made Professor of Molecular Biophysics at Imperial College in 2017. He studied Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam and obtained an MSc in 1995. His PhD was awarded in 1999 at the Chemistry Department at the University of Amsterdam on the topic of photosynthesis research. After a brief postdoctoral research at the Free University Berlin and the University of Amsterdam in 1999, he won an EMBO long term research fellowship, followed by an HFSP long term research fellowship to join the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford in 2000 under Professor Louise Johnson. He won a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Oxford in 2002 and continued at the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics until 2007. In 2007 he was recruited at Imperial College London at the Division of Molecular Biosciences. In 2010 he established and opened a new ultrafast spectroscopy laboratory facility located in the Sir Ernst Chain building at South Kensington. Jasper van Thor is head of the ultrafast spectroscopy laboratory and Molecular Biophysics at Imperial College. He works in the area of ultrafast dynamics and specializes in X-ray Free Electron Laser crystallography and ultrafast laser spectroscopy.