Home

Welcome

Welcome to the home page of Professor Adam Nelson's research group.  We are interested in synthetic organic chemistry and its application to biological problems.  Most of our work involves the development of new methods and strategies to enable exploration of diverse chemical space and, hence, for the discovery of bioactive small molecules.  We are particularly interested in high-throughput molecular discovery approaches that integrate algorithms, plate-based chemistry, automation and biological evaluation.  We then apply these new approaches to discover tools that can be used to interrogate biological mechanisms, particularly using chemical proteomics.  Current and recent projects have focused on exploiting chemical probes to investigate protein kinase biology (e.g. cancer mechanisms), trypanosome biology and bacteriology.  Browse our research pages to find out more about what we do!

Our laboratories are superbly equipped for research at the interface between chemistry and biology.  Our synthetic laboratory in the School of Chemistry at Leeds provides 2m fume cupboards for each researcher.  We are located close to facilities for analytical and preparative HPLC, semi-preparative mass-directed HPLC, analytical LC-MS, IR, NMR (up to 600 MHz), automated synthesis and protein expression.  Locally, a £1.2M chemical proteomics platform has recently been established, and the £16M Astbury BioStructure Laboratory houses cutting-edge cryo-EM, cryo-ET and 950 MHz NMR spectroscopy.

Professor Nelson is Deputy Director of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds and held a EPSRC Established Career Fellowship (2016-22).  Professor Nelson was recently Head of High-Throughput Molecular Discovery at the Rosalind Franklin Institute (2019-2026).

Current and recent research has been funded by EPSRC, BBSRC, the Wellcome Trust and industry (AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Redbrick Molecular, Recursion, Syngenta).  Professor Nelson was awarded the RSC Meldola medal (2001), a Pfizer Academic Award (2002), an AstraZeneca Research award in Organic Chemistry (2005), an RSC Corday-Morgan medal (2007) and the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellent in Medicinal Chemistry (2018).