Cambridge Professor Tom Blundell to inaugurate academic year at Biosciences

The opening lecture of the 2017/18 academic year at the Faculty of Biosciences will be held on 20 September at 12 noon at the faculty's conference hall. Dr Tom Blundell, professor at the University of Cambridge, will give a lecture on "Structural Biology, Bioinformatics and Making New Medicines: Fighting the Emergence of Drug Resistance in Cancer and Infectious Disease". The event will also include speeches by UAB Rector Margarita Arboix and Dean Jaume Farrés.

Dr Thomas Leon Blundell, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of insuline in 1969, has made outstanding contributions to the structural biology of polypeptide hormones, growth factors, activation of receptors, signal transductors and DNA repair. These fields of research are all relevant for the treatment of cancer, tuberculosis and similar diseases. He has developed software for the modelling of proteins and to comprehend the effects mutations have on how they function.

Dr Blundell has received several awards for his research such as the Bernal Lecture Award by the Royal Society (1998) and more recently the Philosophical Society Fellows Prize & Lecture 2014 from the University of Cambridge. He was also president of Britain's Science Council until the year 2011.