Fellows' Research Weekend

Jonathan Ashmore is Bernard Katz Professor of Biophysics at University College London. Although he completed a PhD in theoretical physics with Tom Kibble at Imperial College London and worked for a short while as a postdoc with Abdus Salam in Trieste, he moved to studying biology after reading C H Waddington's books on 'Towards a Theoretical Biology'. And promptly took up laboratory work, first in visual neuroscience, working on the retina in the Biophysics Department at UCL and then at the University of California in San Francisco. He started working on hearing mechanisms while a temporary lecturer at Sussex University and then in 1983 moved to the University of Bristol as a lecturer. He became a Professor in 1993 before taking up his current appointment at UCL in 1996. He has worked in Japan and for a while held a research chair at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, but still considers himself primarily a lab rat.

Jenny Nelson is a Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, where she has researched novel varieties of material for use in solar cells since 1989. Her current research is focussed on understanding the properties of molecular and hybrid semiconductor materials and their application to solar energy conversion. She also works with the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial to explore the mitigation potential of renewable energy technologies. She is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in Materials Science and has published over 250 articles and a book on the physics of solar cells. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.

Chris Dobson is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology at the University of Cambridge, and Master of St John’s College. He was an undergraduate, graduate student and research fellow at the University of Oxford. He then became an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University before returning to Oxford where he was a Professor of Chemistry until moving to Cambridge in 2001. His research activities are primarily concerned with discovering the fundamental origins of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, with the objective of identifying new strategies for their prevention or treatment. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Davy and Royal Medals of the Royal Society and most recently the 2014 Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Feltrinelli International Prize for Medicine, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2014. He was elected to the Fellowship in 1996.