Enzyme Discovery

Imtiaz Khan: Teamwork involves helping other members of the team to achieve the common goal. Effective communication and problem-solving skills, organisational and time-management skills, positive attitude, decision making and strong working ethics are all excellent attributes to make a good team.

Sarah Shepherd: Our work is always looking to reduce society’s reliance on petrochemicals, develop more sustainable routes to products of industrial interest and look to deliver solutions to increase access to essential medicines in the global south. Developing and applying the latest tools and technologies allows us to do this, which makes the research both exciting and rewarding.

Wei Li Thong: What motivates me is the continuous learning opportunities and exciting projects with impactful contributions to scientific communities.

Michael Winn: So much work in the chemical sciences now spans wide and diverse fields. From traditional chemical synthesis, to enzymology, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering and, beyond bioinformatics, computational biology, DNA synthesis and sequencing. Keeping on top of all the latest and greatest developments would be impossible without constant discussion and collaboration with colleagues from an extensive range of backgrounds. We recognise that chemistry is part of a wide and interconnected world and the biggest range of views and knowledge that we can bring together help us to address the real problems and challenges.

Michael Winn: The most important thing in research culture, as in life in general, is openness and respect. Openness to individuals from a range of backgrounds and experiences, and openness to new ideas and ways of doing things. Try to be evidence based as much as possible, and if there isn’t enough evidence to convince everybody around the table of the same facts, then try to design better experiments!

Luis Bering: Chemistry affects nearly every aspect of our modern life, and many desired development goals for a sustainable society will result from advances in the chemistry field.

Jason Micklefield: Research can be tough and there will be many failures. Self-belief, perseverance and hard work are essential. It is also important to be flexible, explore many directions and be ready to exploit the unexpected: rarely do things go as planned.