31/05/2023
'The Thesis Whisperer' at Wolfson
After completing his undergraduate masters in Chemistry at Oxford in 2014, Sam moved to UCL to study for a PhD under Professor Matthew Powner. At UCL his work focused on studying the origins of nucleotides on Earth and it was here that he developed his interest in canonical biological molecules vs xeno-biological molecules - asking why is life based on RNA? In 2018 he took a break from prebiotic chemistry and moved to Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian FRS’s lab at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry in Cambridge. There he worked on epigenetic marks in DNA focusing on G-quadruplexes. He also took on a voluntary secondment at the COVID-19 PCR testing centre at the Anne Maclaren building as part of a collaboration between GSK, Astra Zeneca and the University of Cambridge during the first wave of the 2020 pandemic. He started his current position at the MRC-LMB in April 2021.
