People

Based in the School of Life Sciences, our drug discovery team us made up of medicinal chemists, cell and molecular biologists, protein structural biologists, electrophysiologists and assay development scientists.

The SDDC team posing for a group photo

Meet the team

Prof Erika Mancini

SDDC Director

Prof John Spencer

Head of Medicinal Chemistry 

Dr Antony Oliver

Structural Biology Advisor 

Haitham Hassan 

Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry & Drug Discovery 

Trudy Myers
SDDC Coordinator

Scientific Advisory Board

Dame Margaret Brimble
Director of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Auckland

Prof Adrian Gill
Senior Vice President, Discovery Chemistry, REVOLUTION Medicines

Prof Martin Gosling
Honorary Professor of Drug Discovery (Biochemistry)

Dr Carol Austin
Senior Director Drug Discovery Project Management at Eurofins Discovery

Visiting scientists and associates

Prof Roger Corder
Visiting Honorary Professor

Dr Matthew Duncton

Visiting Scientist

Dr Diane Lee
Research Fellow in Biochemistry

 Prof Tony Moore

Emeritus Professor (Biochemistry)

Dr Daniel Guest

Visiting Scientist

Medicinal chemistry

Meet our medicinal chemistry team.

Chemistry co-leads

Claire Adcock
Research Fellow (Biochemistry)

Andrew McGown
Research Fellow (Chemistry)

Medicinal chemists

Dr Damien Crepin

Research Fellow in Medicinal Chemistry

Dr Yan Lin

Royal Society K C Wong International Fellow

Biology

Meet the Biology team. 

Dr Sarah Lilley

Electrophysiologist, Biology Lead

Heydaythul 'Shamim' Choudhury

Visiting Scientist 

Dr Kay Osborn
Research Fellow in Cell Biology

Helen Webb

Research Fellow in Biochemistry

Dr Mohan Rajasekaran
Research Fellow in Protein and Structural Biology

Dr Sarah Connery
Research Fellow in Protein and Structural Biology

Dr Jessica Booth
Research Fellow in Assay Development & Screening

Skyy Finch-Vaughan 

Research Assistant in Drug Discovery 

PhD Students

Asma Kabiri

Asma is working towards the design and synthesis of drug-like molecules for LMTK3 for her PhD (iCASE-GSK). She obtained an MChem (1st Class Hons) from the University of Keele in 2019.

James Lai-Morrice

James studied at Sussex and prior to starting his PhD at the Centre he had been working as a Research Associate in Chemistry.

Maria Staikopoulou

Maria undertook her degree and Masters at Sussex and she also completed her MSci project in SDDC before starting as a PhD student.