Explore new treatments for traditional ailments such as malaria, the common cold, and a greasy hedgehog at the inaugural lecture of Professor Ed Tate.

Professor Ed Tate presented his inaugural lecture on the 30th November 2016.Watch it here!

Abstract

A chemical biologist invents new ways to explore and understand biology through chemistry, the science of molecules. By creating highly functional molecules we aim to ask new questions about living systems, and ultimately manipulate them – for example by discovering new ways to cure disease.

In his inaugural lecture “New drugs for old diseases: malaria, the common cold, and a greasy hedgehog", Professor Ed Tate will follow the twists and turns that led him from his early career researching fundamental aspects of synthetic chemistry to focusing on chemical biology of disease, aided and abetted by many brilliant scientific collaborators.

This will include a look at his latest research investigating how cells control the chemistry of proteins, and how these processes might be turned to our advantage to create new drugs against diseases such as malaria and cancer. 

Biography

Ed leads a team of chemical biologists based in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London. He gained his BSc in chemistry from the University of Durham, and his PhD from the University of Cambridge under the mentorship of Steve Ley, working on new ways to make naturally occurring molecules.

He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow on a Royal Commission of 1851 Research Fellowship in the lab of Sam Zard at the CNRS at Gif-sur-Yvette and at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, studying the chemistry of free radicals applied to natural product total synthesis. He stayed in Paris for a second fellowship, in the group of Annie Kolb at the Pasteur Institute, where he worked on aspects of gene regulation in bacterial, before returning to the UK in the group of Robin Leatherbarrow, in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial.

He was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship to start his own lab in 2006, and was appointed to a Senior Lectureship in 2010, to Reader in Chemical Biology in 2012, and to a personal Chair in 2014. Ed is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Chemistry and of Biology, he sits on the editorial panels of a number of scientific journals, and has received several awards for his work in chemical biology and drug discovery, including the 2012 Wain Medal, the 2013 MedImmune Protein and Peptide Science Award, the 2013 President and Rector's Award for Excellence in Research Supervision, the 2014 Norman Heatley Award in Chemical Biology, and a 2015 CRUK Programme Foundation Award.