Profile

I live in Derbyshire on the edge of the Peak District with my wife, teenage son (the youngest of 5 boys!) and a dog and 2 cats that we brought back from Malaysia (where I lived and worked for 15 years) – so we all feel cold. I love doing crosswords, writing crosswords, walking, cycling and rock climbing.

The reason that I lived in Malaysia was that I was Vice-Provost at the University of Nottingham’s campus in Malaysia – a UK University but situated 6000 miles away in South-East Asia. We had over 5000 students across 19 schools. I was initially setting up and running the School of Pharmacy and the Faculty of Science but stayed there longer because the country, people, food and temperature were lovely!

So it was there that we rescued a dog and two cats who were strays and ended up bringing them back to the UK. The dog likes the cold and loves the snow – the cats prefer sitting by the fire.

I work in a School of Pharmacy in De Montfort University in Leicester and my research is in to computer-aided drug design. I use computers to model what proteins might look like and to model how small molecules might interact with those proteins. This saves chemists a lot of time because we can then predict which molecules might make good drugs and which ones probably won’t. If we didn’t do this (as indeed was the case before computers were invented) then chemists simply have to make educated guesses at which molecules to make. We can ‘rationalise’ that process and hence this area of science is often called ‘rational drug design’.

I wake up around 7.30 – usually in a rush because I’m not a “morning person”. Once I’ve taken my teenage son to school then I start work around 9am. Sometimes I’ll be in meetings and preparing documents (my main job is to set up and manage a collaboration between our University and another university in Central Asia) and other times I’ll be doing my research on my computer. I’ll often intersperse that with meetings with students who are helping with the research or to do some teaching and supporting of students. I’ll finish around 5.30pm and then I’ll relax!

The bulk of my research is computer-based so I do Chemistry but never touch a test-tube. So I spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen. What I do is look at where atoms are in proteins and molecules and see which are interacting with each other. I use powerful computers to run calculations (simulations) and I can predict what the effect might be on a potential drug molecule if we decide to say change a carbon atom to an oxygen or add an -OH group, for example.