Image above: Fuchter group, January 2019

Group Leader – Professor Matthew Fuchter

Brief Biography:
Matthew Fuchter is a Professor of Chemistry,  Director of Postgraduate Studies, co-Director of the Centre for Drug Discovery Scienceand co-Director of the MRes in Drug Discovery in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London. He is also a member of the Organic Division Council of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the UK representative to the EuCheMS Division of Organic Chemistry and an Associate Editor of the RSC journal MedChemComm. He is involved in multiple multidisciplinary centres of excellence at Imperial including the Institute of Chemical Biology, the Imperial College Network of Excellence in Malaria, the Cancer Research Centre of Excellence, the Antimicrobial Research Collaborative, the Centre for Plastic Electronics and the London Centre for Nanotechnology.

He completed PhD research under the supervision of Professor A. G. M. Barrett, FRS FMedSci and postdoctoral studies at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia, where he worked with Professor A. B. Holmes, FRS. Prior to his position at Imperial College he was the RCUK Academic Fellow at the School of Pharmacy (University of London). He returned to Imperial College in July 2008 as a Lecturer in Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in July 2012, Reader in September 2015 and Professor in September 2018. In 2014 he was awarded the RSC Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize, as well as being admitted to the Royal Society of Chemistry as a Fellow. In 2015, he was selected as a Thieme Chemistry Journal Awardee by the Editorial Board for the Thieme Chemistry journals and was selected as the 'most meritorious runner-up' of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) Prize for a Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia (2015). In 2017, he won an Imperial College President’s Excellence in Research Award and a President’s Medal (together with Professors Tony Barrett, Charles Coombes and Simak Ali) for Excellence in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He was recently awarded the prestigious 2018 Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award for Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry and a 5-year EPSRC Established Career Fellowship. For more details see his personal web page.

PhD students:

• Melis Ekinci (PhD) - Chemical biology of histone methylation
• James Rushworth (PhD) - Polymers for drug delivery
• Dan Mercea (PhD) - Asymmetric "frustrated" Lewis pair catalysis
• Nathan Allcock (PhD) – Mechanism of "frustrated" Lewis pair catalysis
• Kanut Tangsangasaksri (PhD) - Medicinal Chemistry of Novel Drug Targets
• Francesco Salerno (PhD) – Chiral organic electronic materials
• Ollie Bardell-Cox (PhD) – New approaches for antibiotics
• Anne Neumann (PhD) – Understanding functional effects of histone methyltransferase inhibition
• Aditya Raymond Thawani (PhD) – The design and application of novel photoswitches
• Amaia Uriz Huarte (PhD) – New approaches in immunotherapy
• Emily Leonidou (PhD) – Novel approaches towards histone methyltransferase inhibition
• Rosie Fisher (PhD) - Synthesis and applications of novel photoswitches
• Emily Brown (MRes+PhD) - Novel antibiotics targeting glucose uptake
• Nicole Deacon-Smith (MRes+PhD) - Structure-based drug design of novel antifungal agents

Postdoctoral co-workers:

• Jochen Brandt - Chiral organic electronic materials
• Ainoa Rueda Zubiaurre – Medicinal chemistry of epigenetic targets in Plasmodium
• Seán Ryan - Chiral organic electronic materials
• Wenda Shi - Chiral organic electronic materials
• Harry Whitwell - New technologies to map the methylome in cancer

Imperial College Research Fellow:

• Jamie Lewis

MRes students:

• Stephanie Pinharry
• Sachi Sharma
• Vanessa Buffa
• Clara Bernardi
• Xiaohan Wang (Boyle lab)
• Niccolo Venanzi (Schumann lab)
• Chantelle Spiteri (Schumann lab)
• Melina Papageorgiou (Brady lab)
• Raneem Kalsoum (Carling lab)

Undergraduate students:

• Xinjie Pan (MSci)
• Yasmin Farah (BSc)

ERASMUS students:

• Sophie Steinmüller 

Other co-workers affiliated with the group:

• Jessica Wade (Postdoc), Campbell lab – CP-OLEDs from helicene-polymer blends
• Li Wan (PhD), Campbell lab – CP-OLEDs from helicene-polymer blends
• Matthew Ward (PhD), Campbell lab – chiral materials for device applications
• Heather Ang (Postdoc), Brady lab – New technologies to map the methylome in cancer
• Nadia Hoyas Perez (PhD), Lewis lab – Supramolecular chemistry