Executive Committee Member Biographies

David Rees is Vice-President of Medicinal Chemistry at Astex Therapeutics. Prior to Astex, he had 19 years experience as a drug discovery chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, working with Parke-Davis, Organon and, most recently, AstraZeneca where he held the position of Director and Head of the Medicinal Chemistry Department with some 140 staff at the research and development laboratories, Mölndal, Sweden.  He has served on various University positions, editorial boards and international conference committees, he has over 75 publications and patents and is a joint recipient of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Malcolm Campbell award in 2007 for the discovery of the anesthesia drug, Sugammadex.

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Sue Gibson is Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College London.  Her research interests are in synthetic chemistry with emphasis on the development and use of organometallic reagents and catalysts.

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Julian Blagg is Head of Chemistry and Deputy Director of the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). He works on the discovery of small molecule therapeutics for the treatment of cancer in close collaboration with clinical, genetics, biology, structural biology and drug metabolism experts at the ICR and externally. He serves on scientific advisory boards for several non-for-profit and commercial drug discovery groups. Prior to joining the ICR in 2007, he worked in drug discovery research at Pfizer in the UK and USA. 

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Andrew is a Senior Principal Scientist at AstraZeneca in Alderley Park. Andrew has been a practising organic chemist for almost 30 years (6 years in academic institutions and 22 in the pharmaceutical industry). 

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Much of Richard’s career has been in the development of organometallic chemistry, particularly of zirconium, and its applications to organic synthesis.  Current projects span materials for organic electronics and photovoltaics, agonists for the nuclear receptors LRH-1 and SF-1, and developing flow chemistry. Richard is also currently Head of the Graduate School and the Principal Investigator for the ‘Dial-a-Molecule’ EPSRC Grand Challenge Network.

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Matt Tozer is the Director of Medicinal Chemistry Services at Peakdale Molecular, and the head of site for Peakdale's operation on Discovery Park in Sandwich, which now comprises of more than 50 staff.   He worked previously as Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Medivir UK, and before that as a medicinal chemist at the James Black Foundation.  He has more than 50 publications and patents."   Matt provides a direct link between the Organic Division and the Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector interest group.

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Adrian is a Senior Lecturer in organic chemistry at Queen Mary University of London.
He studied for his BSc and PhD at King's College London, the latter under the supervision of Prof Keith Jones.

He was awarded a Royal Society Fellowship to perform postdoctoral research with Professor Istvan Marko at the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and then undertook an industrial postdoctoral position with GSK.

He was a lecturer at the University of Exeter from 2000-closure of the department in 2005, when he moved to his current position at QMUL.  His research interests are in organic synthetic methodology, especially applied in heterocyclic chemistry and natural product total synthesis.

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Ray Jones is Professor of Organic and Biological Chemistry at Loughborough University. His research interests are in heterocyclic and natural product chemistry, with a current focus on cycloaddition methodologies and biomimetic molecules such as pseudopeptides.

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Jonathan Goodman is a Reader in chemistry at the University of Cambridge where he works in the Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics combining computational and experimental approaches to organic chemistry. 

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In this section

• Organic Division
• Organic Division Interest Groups
• Executive Committee
• Forthcoming Events
• International Activities
• Other Networks & Groups
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