Natural Product Chemistry Winner 2006

Distinguished for his wide-ranging contributions to the study of natural products, covering isolation and structure elucidation, biosynthesis and synthesis.

About the winner

Tom Simpson's research covers all aspects of structure, synthesis and biosynthesis of microbial natural products with emphasis in recent years on enzymology, structural biology and molecular genetics of polyketide biosynthetic pathway enzymes.

He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1969, and gained his PhD from the University of Bristol in 1973 working with Jake MacMillan on the structure of polyketide and terpenoid fungal metabolites.

This theme was extended to biosynthetic studies during postdoctoral work in the University of Liverpool with Stan Holker and the Australian National University with Arthur Birch.

He was appointed to a lectureship in chemistry at the University of Edinburgh in 1978 where, inter alia, he developed and applied stable isotope labelling methodology to the biosynthesis of a wide range of microbial compounds.

He moved to professorships in organic chemistry at the University of Leicester in 1988 and Bristol University in 1990, where he holds the Alfred Capper Pass chair of chemistry.

He has published over 180 papers, and has received a number of awards including the RSC Corday-Morgan medal in 1982, the Tilden lectureship in 2001, Simonsen lectureship in 2002 and Hugo Muller lectureship in 2004.  He has also received the Microbial Chemistry medal of the Kitasato Institution in 2005.  He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2006.