Richard Cogdell

Botanist
Born 1949.

Richard Cogdell holds the Hooker Chair of Botany and is also the Director of Glasgow Biomedical Research Centre. He joined the Botany Department in 1975 and became Head of the Department in 1987. He was a Titular Professor of Botany from 1988 before being appointed to the Hooker Chair in 1993.

Since the early 1970's he has been involved in research on bacterial photosynthesis. His work has increasingly focused on the early events of photosynthesis-light harvesting and energy transfer-and the structure and function of the pigment-protein complexes involved in these processes. Along with his colleague Neil Isaacs, he has conducted seminal research into the structure and function of bacterial reaction centres and light-harvesting complexes. He is now concentrating on using the information gained from his structural and functional studies on the purple bacterial pigment-protein complexes to devise ways of using solar energy to produce fuels.

He has received a number of awards and honours. In 1991 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 1996 and the following year he was awarded the guest Lecturership of the Max Planck Institute for Radiation Chemistry at Meulheim on the Ruhr. In 2002 he received the Diawa/Adrian Prize for Anglo-Japanese Research. He was elected FRS in 2007 and FRSA in 2008.

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Neil Isaacs

Chemist

Professor Neil Isaacs holds the Joseph Black Chair of Protein Crystallography. He has held this Chair since 1989.

Isaacs graduated BSc honours in Chemistry from the University of Queensland in 1967 and was awarded a PhD from there in 1970. From 1969-72 he was a Research Assistant at the University Chemical Laboratories, Cambridge. In 1972 he became an IBM Research Fellow (and Junior Research Fellow, Balliol) at Oxford where he worked in Dorothy Hodgkin's group. From 1976 he was an IBM World Trade Research Fellow at the IBM T J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, in New York and held this position for a year. In 1977 he became SERC Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York. A year later he moved to the University of Melbourne and became a University Research Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry. From 1979-89 he was NH & MRC Senior Research Fellow at St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. He then moved to Glasgow in 1989 and was appointed to the Joseph Black Chair of Protein Crystallography.

He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1997.

His research is concerned with the determination of protein structures using single crystal X-ray diffraction methods in order to understand the biological function of the protein. Along with colleague Richard Cogdell, he has conducted seminal research into the structure and function of bacterial reaction centres and light-harvesting complexes.In 2009 he was awarded an Honorary Degree by Nankai University as testament to his many achievements working in the fields of protein crystallography and structural biology.

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