International Advisory Board

• Sir Tom Blundell FRS FMedSci (Chair of the Advisory Board)
• Dr Manos Perros
• Dr Tony Pugsley
• Dr Kai Simons 
• Professor Janet Thornton CBE FRS
• Professor Mike Tyers

Sir Tom Blundell FRS FMedSci

Tom Blundell is Director of Research and Professor Emeritus In the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. Until 2009 he was Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, and Head of the Council of Biological Sciences in Cambridge. His research is focused on structural biology and bioinformatics and their applications to drug discovery and medicine. Most of his work has been on multi-component protein assemblies – cell surface receptors and intracellular signal transduction enzymes - that mediate cell regulation. He has been interested in how high signal to noise is achieved in Nature by using complex molecular interactions and how understanding the architecture of the assemblies can assist the discovery of new medicines, especially for cancer treatment. More recently he has used structural approaches to understanding Mycobacterium tuberculosis with a view to discovering new antimicrobials against TB.

After research and teaching positions in Molecular Biophysics in Oxford and Biochemistry in Sussex Universities, he was appointed in 1976 Professor in Birkbeck College, University of London and in 1989 Honorary Director, Imperial Cancer Research Fund Unit of Structural Molecular Biology. He moved to Cambridge in 1996. Tom Blundell is a member of Academia Europaea, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Academy of Medical Sciences. He has Honorary Doctorates from fifteen universities. Tom Blundell has played an active role in national science policy. In the 1980s, he was a member of the advisory group to the Prime Minister (ACOST). He was Director General, Agricultural and Food Research Council (1991‑1994) and founding Chief Executive, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, BBSRC (1994-1996), Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (1998 to 2005) and President of the UK Biosciences Federation between 2004 and 2008. He has been non-executive Chairman of BBSRC since 1 July 2009. He was a Non-Executive Director of Celltech from 1996 to 2005 and has been involved in science advisory roles with Pfizer, UCB and SmithKlyneBeecham. He co-founded Astex Therapeutics which has oncology drugs in early stage clinical trials in USA and UK.

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Professor Tony Pugsley

Tony Pugsley studied bacteriology and genetics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, where he received his PhD in Applied Microbiology in 1972. After a short period in a pharmaceutical company laboratory, Tony switched to studying bacterial membrane biology as a postdoctoral fellowship in Peter Reeves's group in Adelaide, Australia. Here, Tony worked on the uptake of colicins (toxins produced by and active against Escherichia coli) and on the mechanisms of iron capture by bacteria, both of which rely on the same outer membrane receptors and transport systems. Tony's next postdoctoral port of call was Charlottesville in Virginia, USA, where he worked in Carl Schnaitman's group on major E. coli outer membrane proteins, notably on their structure and role in membrane permeability. From Charlottesville, Tony move to Jürg Rosenbusch's laboratory at the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland, where he continued working on the control of outer membrane protein production, and also on the production and release of colicins from producing cells. He continued the latter when he took a postdoctoral fellowship in Maxime Schwartz's lab at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. This led to his current interest in the mechanisms of protein localization and secretion.  Tony is now Professor of the Institut Pasteur, where he both is Scientific Director and head of a research unit of around 20 working on bacterial transcription factors and bacterial protein traffic. His main interests are in how proteins find their correct location in bacteria, how bacterial surface structures are assembled, how proteins insert into or cross the bacterial outer membrane, and posttranslational modification of exported proteins. He is a member of EMBO and the Leopoldina Academy, a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and special features editor of the journal Molecular Microbiology.

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Dr Kai Simons

Dr Kai Simons Kai Simons received his MD degree from the University of Helsinki and his board certification in 1964. Simons then conducted postdoctoral research with A.G. Bearn at Rockefeller University in New York. In 1967, he accepted a position from the Finnish Medical Research Council at the University of Helsinki, where he rose through the ranks and became a Senior Investigator in 1972, with appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry, and Bacteriology and Serology. In 1975, he became a Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany and he started the Cell Biology Program, which became the focal point for molecular cell biology in Europe. In 2001 Kai Simons moved to Dresden to build up the new Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. This Institute is today an internationally recognized center in its area of research. For his many contributions to cell biology, Simons has received numerous accolades, including the Keith Porter Lectureship of the American Society for Cell Biology (1990), Anders Jahre for Medical Research in 1995, a Harvey Society Lecturer (1994), Dunham Lecturer at Harvard Medical School (1996), and Li Lecturer, UC Berkeley (1998). He has received the Runeberg Prize, Finland, the Laurens van Deenen Medal, University of Utrecht, the Schleiden Medal of the Academy Leopoldina and the Äyräpää Prize, Finland. He is Doctor Honoris Causa at the universities of Oulu and Kuopio , Finland and Leuven, Belgium. Kai Simons is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, and the President of the European Life Scientist Organization.

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Janet Thornton CBE FRS

Aftergraduating in Physics, Janet studied for her Ph.D. in Biophysics at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London (1970-1973). She then moved to Oxford, where she worked in molecular biophysics with David Phillips until 1978 when she returned to London to the NIMR, and subsequently to a Fellowship at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 1990 she was appointed Professor and Director of 'Biomolecular Structure and Modelling Unit' at University College London and later was also appointed to the Bernal Chair in the Crystallography Department at Birkbeck College. In October 2001 Janet became Director of the EMBL – European Bioinformatics Institute on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus at Hinxton, near Cambridge. In the same year, she received the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) award.  In 1999 Janet was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of EMBO in 2000; in 2002 she was appointed Extraordinary Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge and Honorary Professor, University of Cambridge and in 2003 she was elected a Foreign Associate Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She has also received honorary degrees from several universities. 

The goal of Janet Thornton’s research is to understand biological processes at the molecular level, by studying protein structures and sequences using computational approaches. Her work involves the classification of protein families and structures to elucidate the principles governing their folding and evolution. With her group, she studies the functions and interactions of proteins with other molecules in the cell from a structural perspective. 

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Professor Mike Tyers FRSE

Professor Mike Tyers is an internationally-recognised leader on the pathways and networks that control cell communication and cell division and his research interests span the cell, systems and translational biology themes of SULSA. Mike was SULSA's Director from 2007 to 2011 and SULSA Research Professor and CH Waddington Chair in Systems Biology at The University Edinburgh. He was previously a Senior Investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada, and a Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Toronto. He has now taken up a position as Professor at the University of Montreal. Mike's research aims to understand how the fundamental cellular processes of cell growth and division are coordinated to maintain size homeostasis, and how these processes are controlled by a host of internal and external signals. His studies include the interrogation of global networks of phopshorylation-based signal transduction and the detailed biophysical and biochemical analysis of protein interactions and enzyme mechanism in the ubiquitin system. He also uses systematic chemcial genetic screens to probe cellular network responses, with the long term aim of developing combinatorial small therapeutic approaches to infectious disease and cancer. These system level strategies have motivated him to develop an international resource for protein and genetic interactions called the BioGRID database (www.thebiogrid.org). His recent interests have focused on the development of synthetic biology approaches to rebuild natural and artificial biological systems in surrogate genetic hosts.

Mike was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2009, has been a member of the Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization since 2008 and has gained Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Awards from 2007-2012. He is a member of the following organisations: Royal Society of Edinburgh, European Molecular Biology Organization, Royal Society of Canada, Canadian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology American Association for Advancement of Science, and Genetics Society of America.

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