John E. Ladbury - Deputy Chair

A PhD in inorganic polymer chemistry funded by the Ministry of Defence on the paradoxical problem of making nuclear warheads safer was a somewhat unconventional route to a career in biochemistry. My biochemical education really began as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in 1990 where I worked on the thermodynamics of more complex polymers than I had previously encountered, namely proteins and DNA. This was followed by further postdoctoral research at Harvard University Medical School (on protein structural determination by NMR spectroscopy) and New York University Medical Center (on tyrosine kinase signal transduction). I was subsequently privileged to obtain a Career Development Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust in 1994 which enabled me to return to the UK to the University of Oxford.I joined University College London in 1996 and became a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in 1998. In 2003 I became Professor of Molecular Biophysics and renewed my Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. I accepted the Edward Rotan Distinguished Professorship in Cancer Research at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, USA, in 2008 and am currently involved in research largely focused on the understanding of intracellular spatial and temporal influence of proteins in tyrosine kinase-mediated signalling, and protein-targeted drug design.