People

  • Tonia Aristotelous
    PhD Research Student

    Tonia received her First Class BSc Honours degree in Biomolecular Drug Discovery from the University of Dundee in 2011. After her graduation, she joined the Hopkins Lab as a part-time Research technician in the Biophysics lab. She is currently a postgraduate student in the Biophysics group and her PhD work focusses on the application of SPR on GPCRs.

  • Jérémy Besnard
    Postdoctoral Research Assistant

    Jérémy graduated with a French “Diplôme d’Ingénieur Chimiste” from The Ecole Nationale Superieure de Chimie de Montpellier in 2008. During that time he spent one year in industry at the Pfizer Research centre in Sandwich where his interest for computational chemistry began. Jérémy's work involves using chemoinformatics techniques to automatically design druglike compounds in silico that fulfill desired polypharmacological profiles.

  • Richard Bickerton
    Senior Research Associate

    Richard received a Masters Degree in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry from Balliol College, University of Oxford in 1999. He subsequently gained an MSc in Molecular Modelling and Bioinformatics from Birkbeck College, University of London before spending 5 years in industry at Inpharmatica, a London-based drug discovery company. In 2005 he undertook a PhD at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Sir Tom Blundell FRS MedSci where he studied molecular and evolutionary properties of protein-protein interactions. Richard's work in Dundee involves using a range of informatics approaches to integrate large-scale data on pharmacology and chemogenomics with information on protein structure and evolution to address questions of target prioritization, druggability and network pharmacology. Richard was jointly awarded the School of Life Sciences Innovator of the Year Award 2012.

  • Ian Carruthers
    Ian Carruthers
    PhD Research Student

    Ian Michael Carruthers BSc Hons MRes is a postgraduate student in the Medicinal Informatics group. The focus of Ian's PhD is to apply informatics and algorithms to existing genomic and chemistry data to attempt to gain new insights into protein druggability and selectivitiy. Ian received his First Class Bachelor's Degree in Microbiology from the University of Liverpool in 2001. He subsequently gained an MRes in Bioinformatics from the University of York before spending 7 years in industry at Inpharmatica, a London-based drug discovery company, developing bioinformatics tools and database solutions to support both internal discovery projects and collaborations with external companies. Ian was a heavily involved in the development of the original DrugStore database, and Kinase SARfari platform, which are now being released as open source resources by the ChEMBL group at the EBI.

  • Iva Hopkins Navratilova
    Iva Hopkins Navratilova
    Independent Investigator

    Iva pioneered the development of the first biosensor methods to analyse ligand-GPCRs interactions.  Iva has over 14 years of experience in biosensor research with an MSc biosensor development (Masaryk University 2000) and PhD for QCM and EIS based immunosensors (Masaryk University 2003). During her postdoc at the University of Utah (Salt Lake City, USA), Iva pioneering the first application of Biacore SPR-based biosensor technology for membrane associated receptors by solubilisation, on-chip purification, and stabilization of GPCRs. Before establishing the Biosensor Lab in Dundee, Iva was Principal Scientist at Pfizer responsible for application of SPR to over 30 drug discovery projects. Iva has been awarded Pfizer’s Technology of the Year award in 2007 and the University of Dundee School of Life Sciences Innovator of the Year 2011.

  • andrew hopkins
    Andrew Hopkins
    Chair of Medicinal Informatics and SULSA Research Professor of Translational Biology

    Andrew attended the University of Manchester on a British Steel Scholarship, graduating with a First Class Honours in Chemistry. Following a spell in the steel industry, Andrew undertook a doctorate in molecular biophysics under at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof David Stuart FRS. Directly from Oxford he joined Pfizer in 1998, where he established various new functions for the company including the Target Analysis Group, Indications Discovery and Knowledge Discovery. He has won several awards including the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Capps Green Zomaya medal (2008); Corwin Hansch Award (2007); Pfizer Team Achievement Award (2004); Pfizer Achievement Award (2002); Pfizer Leadership Award (2002). Andrew’s papers include the highest cited paper published in the past 5 years by Nature Chemical Biology and the second highest cited paper ever published by Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

  • Adrian Schreyer
    Postdoctoral Research Assistant

    Adrian has a broad background in computational approaches to drug discovery including structural bioinformatics and chemoinformatics. He graduated from the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences with a BSc in Applied Biology and gained a Master of Research in Bioinformatics from the University of York afterwards. He also holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he studied under the supervision of Professor Sir Tom Blundell FRS FMedSci and stayed on for three more years as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Blundell and Hyvönen groups. Adrian's work involves the integration of large-scale macromolecular structure information with biological and chemical data into a single application platform and their analysis in the context of drug discovery.

  • Claire Shepherd
    Claire Shepherd
    PhD Research Student

    Claire graduated with a First Class BSc Honours Degree in Medical Biochemistry with Industrial Experience from the University of Manchester in 2013, where she was also awarded the DS Jackson Prize for Most Outstanding Student. During her degree she spent one year working in industry at AstraZeneca, Alderley Park where she developed an interest for drug discovery and biophysics. She is currently a postgraduate student in the Biophysics lab and her work involves the development of SPR based assays for GPCRs.

  • Willem van Hoorn
    Postdoctoral Research Assistant

    Willem gained a Masters Degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Twente, the Netherlands. At the same university he obtained a PhD in computational chemistry in the group of David Reinhoudt. This was followed by a two year postdoctoral position with Bill Jorgensen at Yale University performing free energy calculations by Monte Carlo simulation and contributing code to Matador, a protein-ligand docking tool. Willem subsequently joined Pfizer in Sandwich, UK where he spent just over ten years supporting drug discovery projects and developing chemoinformatics-based datamining tools. This was followed by a position as senior solutions consultant at Accelrys in Cambridge, UK delivering Pipeline Pilot based solutions to customers ranging from small biotech to big pharma. Recently Willem was involved in developing the informatics platform for the IMI European Lead Factory. Willem’s work in Dundee involves pursuing his interests in automation of the drug discovery process.