Image above: Fuchter group – April 2017

Group Leader – Dr Matthew Fuchter

Brief Biography:
Dr Fuchter is a Reader in Chemistry,  Director of Postgraduate Studies, and 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 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 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 and Reader in September 2015. 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. For more details see his personal web page.

PhD students:

• Thomas Chavas (PhD) - Chemical biology of histone methyltransferases
• Katie Addison (PhD) - Chemical biology of histone methyltransferases
• Alexandra Lubin (PhD) - Epigenetic targets in malaria
• Melis Ekinci (PhD) - Chemical biology of histone methylation
• Hannah Cook (PhD) - Kinase anti-cancer medicinal chemistry
• Luíza dos Reis Cruz (PhD) - Kinase anti-cancer medicinal chemistry
• 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 (MRes/PhD) – Chiral organic electronic materials

Postdoctoral co-workers:

• Jochen Brandt - Luminescent helicenes and their use in organic light emitting devices
• Ornella Di Pietro - Medicinal Chemistry of Novel Drug Targets
• Ainoa Rueda Zubiaurre – Medicinal chemistry of epigenetic targets in Plasmodium

MRes students:

• Shengpan Zhang – New approaches in immunotherapy
• Amaia Uriz Huarte – New approaches in immunotherapy
• Daniel  Miles – Photoswitchable inhibitors
• Rachael Tucker – Medicinal chemistry of SIRT2
• Sabrina Yahiya – Transmission blocking in malaria
• Suricha Ruaysawangboon – Histone methyltransferase therapeutics for cancer

Other co-workers affiliated with the group:

• Louise Kerry (PhD), Rudenko lab - Targeting epigenetic processes in African trypanosomes
• Jessica Wade (Postdoc), Campbell lab – CP-OLEDs from helicene-polymer blends
• Heather Ang (Postdoc), Brady lab – New technologies to map the methylome in cancer