Anniversary Lecture

Sugars and Proteins

Prof. Ben Davis

Ben Davis got his B.A. (1993) and D.Phil. (1996) from the University of Oxford. During this time he learnt the beauty of carbohydrate chemistrytake up a lectureship at the University of Durham. In the autumn of 2001 he moved to the Dyson Perrins Laboratory, University of Oxford and received a fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford. He was promoted to Full Professor in 2005. His group's research centres on the chemical understanding and exploitation of biomolecular function (Synthetic Biology, Chemical Biology and Chemical Medicine), with an emphasis on carbohydrates and proteins. In particular, the group's interests encompass synthesis and methodology; target biomolecule synthesis; inhibitor/probe/substrate design; biocatalysis; enzyme & biomolecule mechanism; biosynthetic pathway determination; protein engineering; drug delivery; molecular biology; structural biology; cell biology; glycobiology; molecular imaging and in vivo biology. This work has received the 1999 RSC under the supervision of Professor George Fleet. He then spent 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Bryan Jones at the University of Toronto, exploring protein chemistry and biocatalysis. In 1998 he returned to the U.K. to Meldola medal and prize, the 2001 RSC Carbohydrate Award sponsored by Syngenta, an AstraZeneca Strategic Research Award, a DTI Smart Award, a Mitzutani Foundation for Glycoscience Award, the 2002 Philip Leverhulme Prize, the 2005 Royal Society Mullard Prize and Medal, the RSC 2005 Corday-Morgan Medal, the 2006 International Association for Protein Structure Analysis and Proteomics Young Investigator Award, the 2008 Wain Medal for Chemical Biology, the 2008 American Chemical Society's Horace S. Isbell Award, the 2009 Elsevier Carbohydrate Research Award for Creativity in Carbohydrate Chemistry, the 2009 RSC Norman Heatley Award, a 2009 Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the 2010 the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan, (SSOCJ) Lectureship Award and in 2012 both the RSC Bio-organic Chemistry Award and the first UK recipient of the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award for Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry.