FBLD 2008 Scientific Advisory Board

Roderick E. Hubbard , Ph.D.

Apart from brief sabbaticals at Harvard, Rod's academic career has been spent at the University of York. His research interests are in the determination, analysis and exploitation of protein structure. During the 1980s he developed some of the early molecular graphics and modelling systems for studying protein structure (HYDRA and QUANTA) that still remain in use today. In the 1990s, he helped to build (and directed) the Structural Biology Laboratory at York as a major centre, with over 80 scientists studying the structure and function of proteins. For the past fifteen years, his personal research interests have focussed on understanding the relationship between structure, mechanism and function in various protein systems (including proteases, nuclear receptors and kinases) and increasingly on how to exploit structural information in ligand and drug discovery. Since 2001, he has spent some of his time at Vernalis, where he helped establish and apply structure-based drug discovery methods including virtual screening and fragment based lead discovery. He is a consultant to a number of pharmaceutical and technology companies in fragment based methods and drug discovery and is also Chairman of the Biomolecular Sciences committee of the BBSRC.