GROUP MEMBERS
Principal Investigator
Dr. David J. Clarke
Senior Lecturer, School of Chemistry.
Director of the MSc Programme in Analytical Chemistry.
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David J. Clarke hails from South Yorkshire, but moved to Scotland to complete his MChem (2001) and PhD (2006) in the School of Chemistry, at the University of Edinburgh. His postgraduate research was focused on in enzymology and protein chemistry. David was then appointed as Teaching Fellow in the School (2006); before a RASOR post-doctoral research fellowship. During this appointment his research focused on the application of high resolution FT-ICR mass spectrometry techniques to biological systems.
He was appointed as Chancellor's Fellow in the School of Chemistry in September 2014, (Tenured) Lecturer in September 2017 and Senior Lecturer in March 2019. He leads the Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Group and is the academic lead for the School's Mass Spectormetry Facility.
Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry
Member of the Biochemical Society
Member of the British Mass Spectrometry Society
Member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry
Investigator - Consortium for Top-Down Proteomics
Post-Graduate Students
Maria Mateos Jimenez (4th Year PhD)
Maria graduated with a degree in Pharmacy from Complutense University of Madrid in 2016, completing her research project as an Erasmus student at The Jagiellonian University in Krakow. After a 6-month internship in the Department of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Development at Merck KGaA (Darmstadt), she came to The University of Edinburgh to pursue her MSc degree in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry. As part of the PCDS program, she will be applying mass spectrometry to study protein-protein interactions.
Peter Fox (2th Year PhD)
Peter completed his BSc Biomedical science at Leeds Beckett University completing two summer research projects and a dissertation project focusing on molecular biology and protein expression with Dr Carine De Marcos. He then completed an MSc by research at University of Leeds, School of Molecular and Cellular Biology with Prof Frank Sobott focusing on the use of the native mass spectrometry to identify membrane protein associated lipids. In 2022, he joined the Clarke group at the University of Edinburgh and is now applying covalent labelling FT-ICR-MS to the foot printing of antigen-antibody interactions. His project is a collaboration with GSK Vaccines, Siena.
Thomas Ballinger (1st Year PhD, EastBIO DTP Programme)
Thomas graduated from Washington State University in 2023 with a BS in Genetics and Cell Biology and a BA in Music. During his undergrad he worked on research projects involving plant lipids, archaeal antimicrobial proteins, and ferroptosis in C. elegans. Thomas has now joined the EASTBIO DTP for his PhD project in the Clarke group where he will be using mass spectrometry approaches to study the assembly dynamics of bacterial encapsulins, as well as the effect encapsulation has on various industrially relevant enzymes.
Master Students
Andreas Backman (2023-2024, MChem)
Andreas Backman (MChem, 2023-2024)
​Andreas is a 5th year MChem student at the University of Edinburgh doing a project investigating covalent protein modifications to improve sequence coverage by electron capture dissociation for top-down mass spectrometry. His 4th year project was supervised by Prof. Dusan Uhrin applying quantitative NMR to determine ethanol concentration in whisky samples. With a DAAD Rise Germany scholarship he studied the electronic structure properties of water and surfactant solutions by liquid jet photoelectron spectroscopy at the Fritz Haber institute in Berlin in 2022.
Alumni
Dr Jo Simpson (2016-2018, PDRA)
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Dr Lulu Tucker (2015-2019, PhD student)
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Dr Sam Hughes (2015-2019, PhD student)
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Dr Jenn Ross (2016-2020, PhD student)
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Dr Kelly Gallagher (2016-2020, PhD student)
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Dr Tom Lambert (2017-2021, PhD student)
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Dr Lanvrentis Galanopoulos (2017-2021, PhD student).
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Dr Kiani Jeacock (20218-2022, PhD Student).
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Sally Vanden-Hehir (2014-2015, MChemX)
Alison McKenzie (2015-2016, MChemX)
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Hayley Lazar (2016, Visiting Student. B. S. Chemistry, University of Connecticut)
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Matthias Tinzl (2016, Erasmus exchange, ETH Zurich)
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Sophie Atkins (2016-2017, BSc Chemistry)
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Sam Garel-Jones (2016-2017, BSc Chemistry)
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Michael Ness (2016-2017, Biochemistry Honours)
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Michael Palasser (2017, Erasmus exchange. Innsbruck University)
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Kathryn Stevenson (2017-2018, MChemX)
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Hannah Moseley (2018-2018, BSc Chemistry)
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Adam Karpinski (2018, Erasmus Exchange. University of Warsaw)
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Ben Wong (2018-2019, MChem)
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Lenette Kjaer (2018-2019, MChemX)
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Andreas Olympios (2019-2020, MChemX)
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Simon Hall (2021-2022, MChem).
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Minghui Zhu (2021-2022, BSc, Chemistry).
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Jessica Wong (2022-2023, MChem).
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Sofia Zhadonova, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (2022).
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