Panellists

Professor Dame Athene Donald is Master of Churchill College and Professor Emerita of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge. Her research spanned the physics-biological sciences interface in an interdisciplinary way, and she currently chairs the REF2021 Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel. She has had long links with industry including funding. She has worked with both EPSRC and BBSRC, and sat on the ERC’s Scientific Council for six years. Currently she is the lead at the Royal Society on their work on the Research System and has input into policy discussions through the Royal Society and other roles (for instance, she chaired the Department of Culture, Media and Sports Scientific Advisory Council).

Chiara has a first degree and a PhD in chemistry, obtained from the University of Pisa and from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. During her PhD she focused on the structural biology and biochemistry of iron binding proteins and spent few months at EMBL in Heidelberg and a longer research time at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. She then moved to New York City, to carry out her post-doctoral work on protein-RNA interactions at Columbia University and then back to the UK, at Imperial College London, where she worked on viral proteins. She started her editorial career in October 2015 at Nature Communications and joined Nature Nanotechnology in June 2017, where she handles nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine papers. Chiara is based in London.

He is a Professor of Physical Chemistry and Biophysics in the Department of Chemistry and at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Professor Knowles is co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Protein Misfolding Diseases at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Knowles has received several distinguished awards for his work including the Harrison Meldola Memorial Prize (2012) and the Corday-Morgan Prize (2017) awarded by The Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics (2017).

Professor Knowles research focuses on applying physical approaches to study the self-assembly of protein molecules in the context of both biological function and malfunction.  His groundbreaking work on the chemical kinetics of protein misfolding and self-assembly, in particular, has transformed our understanding of the pathways that generate the aberrant forms of misfolded proteins believed to be the primary cause of disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Professor Knowles studied Biology at the University of Geneva, and Physics at ETH Zurich. He moved to Cambridge in 2004 to work towards his PhD in the Cavendish Laboratory and the Nanoscience Centre. In 2008 Professor Knowles was elected to a Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, and was then appointed successively to a University Lectureship, Readership and Professorship. Since 2016, he holds Professorships in both the Department of Chemistry and the Cavendish Laboratory (Department of Physics).

Professor Knowles has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles.