Mathew has been named winner of the RSC’s Jeremy Knowles Award, for the generation of single-molecule fluorescence microscopy approaches for visualising protein aggregates in neurodegenerative disease and protein-membrane disruption, and their application in drug discovery. Mathew receives £3000, a medal and a certificate. The Royal Society of Chemistry’s prizes have recognised excellence in the chemical sciences for more than 150 years. This year’s winners join a prestigious list of past winners in the RSC’s prize portfolio, 60 of whom have gone on to win Nobel Prizes for their work, including 2022 Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi and 2019 Nobel laureate John B Goodenough. On receiving the prize, Mathew said: It’s a wonderful recognition not just of my own work, but of the many students, postdocs, clinical collaborators and industrial partners I’ve been fortunate to work with. For me, this award underlines the value of using physical chemistry to tackle real biological and medical prob...

Congratulations go to our MSc student, Beth Fisher, who has not only won a prize for the taught component of her MSc in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry, but also scooped the research presentation prize. Beth has done an excellent job on progressing our work on ovarian cancer with Dr Mike Rimmer, and will be missed when she starts her graduate degree in medicine at Cambridge later in the year. 

Huge congratulations to Noelia on passing her viva. Thank you also to Amy Buck and Mike Devine for examining Noelia. 

Dan Edwards, a postdoctoral research associate in the group, has been awarded a prestigious early postdoctoral fellowship from the Chief Scientist Office (CSO), part of the Scottish Government Health Directorate. Dan did his PhD with Prof. Scott Cockroft and Dr Amanda Jarvis, and joined the ESMB group as part of a Leverhulme-funded project between Prof. Scott Cockroft and Prof. Mathew Horrocks. Dan has previously won the Institute for Regeneration and Repair's Innovator 2026 competition, and runs an outreach science activity funded by AIBIO-UK. He's also on the School's Post-Doc Committee.   Dan will begin the three-year fellowship this year with a project focused on advancing Parkinson's disease diagnosis through biomarkers that enable early detection from accessible biofluids.  On the award, Dan said: "It is an honour to be awarded the CSO early postdoctoral fellowship. This award will give me the time and resources to develop assays to improve our approaches to ...

Noelia has become the second member of the group to win the Joseph Black Conference science photo competition. Her photo, entitled "Ground Breaking Science", shows Tianxiao and Kris determining the focal length of a lens in the corridor of the Chemistry School. 

Dan has been awarded the IRR Innovator 2026 prize, along with £5,000 in research funding. Dan's winning idea centres on the use of extracellular vesicles, tiny particles that can be isolated from all biological fluids, as a tool for the early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, a breakthrough approach with significant clinical potential. The competition was organised in partnership with Dr Andrew McBryde of Edinburgh Innovations' ITPA Translational Community, and judged by a distinguished panel of industry experts: Hayley Gooding (Concept Life Sciences), Lissa Herron (Converge Challenge), and Douglas Gibson (previous IRR Innovator winner). Dan said: The IRR Innovator competition provided a fantastic opportunity to present my research to a broad audience and think creatively about its future commercial impact. I'm grateful for the insight and comments from the panel and look forward to using the award to progress my research.

Last weekend ESMB PhD students   Sofia   and Ellie attended the 29th EAP meeting held by the Analytical Science Network in Kettering, with both of them giving talks about their projects. Ellie presented her research on imaging and detecting PM2.5s in the brain, while   Sofia   spoke about her work designing a nanopore sensing platform for early diagnosis of ovarian cancer. The conference was a fantastic opportunity to meet fellow PhD students working in analytical science, as well as to network with industry and academic professionals in these fields.