Studying at the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, you will be taught by internationally recognised academics. Professor Conrad Bessant is the Head of Bioinformatics and teaches on both the Bioinformatics and Ecology and Evolutionary Genomics courses. He consistently publishes in high-impact journals and is interested in leveraging the latest proteomics (large-scale study of proteins) technologies to answer fundamental questions in biology and medicine. In additional to his academic career, Professor Bessant has worked as a software developer and freelance technical journalist.
His lab is devises and implements novel data analysis solutions for biomedical research, particularly when proteomics data is involved. Current applications of his work include understanding the role of cell signalling in cancer, studying protein expression during viral infection and large scale evidence-based genome annotation. His team are also affiliated with The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.
Professor Stephen Rossiter is Head of the Biology Department and teaches on the Ecology and Evolutionary Genomics course as part of the Borneo field course module. He is an award-winning, world-renowned expert in Organismal Biology and his lab is involved with collaborative studies in Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and China. His research mainly focuses on bats, which number over 1,100 species and he is especially interested in how populations diverge.
Previous high-profile research from him has found genes to save ash trees from deadly beetle, the Emerald Ash Borer and uncovered a striking similarity in the DNA that enables some bats and dolphins to echolocate. As part of the latter study, he showed a key gene that gives their ears the ability to detect high-frequency sound has produced the same amino acid changes over time in both creatures. It is first time that identical genetics has been shown to underpin the evolution of similar characteristics in very different organisms and suggests the gene must be critical for the animals' echolocation.