Group Leader

Professor Matthew Fuchter

Brief Biography:
Matthew Fuchter is a Professor of Chemistry and co-Director of the Centre for Drug Discovery Science in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London. He is also a Founder, NED and the chemistry lead for NK:IO Ltd. Beyond this, he is the UK representative to the EuCheMS Division of Organic Chemistry, a Theme Champion and Management Board member of the Centre for Processable Electronics, and an Editorial Board Member for the journals RSC Medicinal Chemistry (formally MedChemComm) and Chirality. He was formally a member of the Organic Division Council of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and an Associate Editor of RSC Medicinal Chemistry. 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 Processable 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.

Professor Fuchter has been awarded a number of prizes in recognition of his work. These include the RSC Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize (2014), 2nd prize for a Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia (2015), conferred by the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC), a 2017 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, the 2018 Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award for Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, a Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom (2020), conferred by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences, the RSC Corday-Morgan Prize (2021), a RSC 2022 Materials Chemistry Division Horizon Prize: Stephanie L Kwolek Award, and the 2023 RSC BMCS Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize.

For more details see his personal web page.

The group

PhD students

• Magdalena Odaybat (PhD) – Synthesis and applications of novel photoswitches
• Thomas Jackson (PhD) – Photoswitchable peptides
• Lisa Dollhopf (PhD) – Photopharmacology
• Kim Tran (PhD) – Photopharmacology
• Juan Manuel Moreno Naranjo (PhD) – Chiral organic electronic materials
• Francesco Furlan (PhD) – Chiral materials for device applications
• Hamish Trowell (PhD) – Novel polymer systems for data storage
• David Sharp (PhD) – Photoswitches applied to glyco chem bio
• Thitiya 'Joy' Lasing (PhD) – Structure-based inhibitor design
• Louis Minion (PhD) – Novel imaging of chiral materials
• Hussain Al Tuwailib (PhD) - Polymeric conjugated materials
• Ethan Powell (PhD) – Chiral materials for spin applications
• Kai Zheng (PhD) – Discovery methods for photopharmacology
• Sadiya Quazi (PhD) – Dual agents with molecular glues for cancer therapy
• Dominika Daremiak (PhD) – Medicinal chemistry of sugar transferase enzymes
• Zak Elliott (MRes/PhD) – Photopharmacology
• Sofia Philipps (MRes/PhD) – Photopharmacology

Postdoctoral co-workers

• Xingyuan Shi – Chiral organic electronic materials
• Matthew Ward (PhD) – Chiral materials for device applications
• David Reger – Chiral organic electronic materials
• Davia Prischich – Photopharmacology
• Helena Pickford - Photopharmacology

Research Assistants

• Marta Di Girolamo – Chiral materials spectroscopy

Visiting Researchers

• Wenda Shi – Chiral organic electronic materials

MRes students

• Zhiyu Xu – Chiral emitters
• Qianyi Zhang – Chiral emitters
• Kenneth Li – Photoswitchable peptides
• Priyankush Choudhury – Medicinal chemistry

Other co-workers affiliated with the group

• Richard Barlett (PhD), Aragon lab, LMS
• Krzysztof Oliwa (PhD), Greenaway lab, Imperial Chemistry