Peter Leadlay FRS FRSC MA DPhil - Curriculum Vitae#

Current post: Herchel Smith Professor of Biochemistry Emeritus, University of Cambridge, UK. DOB 13/12/1949.

Academic: BA 1971; DPhil 1974, University of Oxford; Postdoctoral Fellow, ETH Zürich (1974-1976); Demonstrator, Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford (1976-1979); Demonstrator in Biochemistry (1979-1984) then Lecturer, Reader, Professor of Molecular Enzymology, and Herchel Smith Professor of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (until 2017).

Other appointments:

1999-2004 BBSRC Professorial Research Fellow; 2000 elected Fellow of the Royal Society; 2003-2004 Prix Chaire Internationale de Recherche “Blaise Pascal”, Institut Pasteur Paris; 2009-2014; 2011- present Honorary Professor, Wuhan University, China. Several international prizes and several named lectures at institutions in Europe, N America and China.

Research interests

Mechanistic enzymology. Especially, the chemistry, biochemistry, genetics, genomics, structural and synthetic biology, and pathway engineering of the microbial biosynthesis of antibiotics and other bioactive natural products. Co-discoverer of a novel assembly-line paradigm for enzyme catalysis used in the biosynthesis of thousands of natural products of medical interest. Whole-genome sequencing of 100s of actinomycete genomes (8-10 Mbp) and their genome mining to discover novel natural products and enzymes.

Other Professional Activities

Member of various committees and advisory boards in UK and overseas, including:

Member of the SAB for the Helmholtz Institute for Protein Science, University of Saarland (2009-2016); Chairman of the 40th Meeting of the European Society for Bio-Organic Chemistry 2006. Co-organiser of the Six Academies (UK, USA, PR China) Symposia on Synthetic Biology (2012-2014)

International Grants and Evaluation Committees

Panel member, DFG Exzellenzinitiative des Bundes und der Länder zur Forderung von Wissenschaft und Forschung an deutschen Hochschulen (2005-2006); Referee (2006-) and International Member of Grants Committees CSD8.2 (2008-2009) and SVSE2 (2009-2010) of the ANR (French National Research Agency) (working in French); Invited panel member for the Lichtenberg Professorship of the Volkswagenstiftung (2011-2016).

Translational activity

Co-founder (1996) of the spin-out company Biotica Technology, developing new medicines from engineered polyketide drugs; Founding Shareholder of its successor company Isomerase Therapeutics (2013-).

National and International Conferences

Between 1980 and 2017 delivered >200 invited symposium and plenary lectures.

Patent activity

A named inventor on 15 families of patent applications and granted patents in various jurisdictions. His scientific contributions have been cited as prior art in over 250 International Patent Applications.

Publications

Web of Science lists 250 articles, cited in total 13,116 times (h-value 65). Pubmed lists 221.