Medicinal Chemistry 1 Group

Imogen is a PhD student in the Division of Structural Biology focused on designing small molecule splicing modulators, in collaboration with the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery.

Dr Joshua Clark studied for his undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Bristol before moving to the University of St Andrews for his PhD where he worked under the supervision of Professor David O’Hagan. His PhD project involved the synthesis and study of selectively fluorinated cyclohexane derivatives. He then worked as a radiochemist for Eurofins Selcia before joining the ICR in June 2022 as a Postdoctoral Training Fellow.

Ms Elizabeth Cosgrove obtained an MSci in Chemistry with German from University College London in June 2021. She carried out her final year research project at Humboldt University in Berlin, investigating novel fluorination routes using transition metal-based catalysts. Beth joined the ICR in October 2021 as a PhD student in the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery looking at synthetic oligomers as RNA helicase inhibitors.

Dr Federica Gigante joined the ICR in September 2021 as a Higher Scientific Officer. Federica carried out her PhD in medicinal chemistry at the University of Dundee, in the group of Professor Ian Gilbert, her research focused on antiparasitic compounds. She then worked as a synthetic and medicinal chemist in a few companies (Evotec, Angelini, C4T, Eli Lilly) developing large libraries of compounds for several research projects. She then moved to Dotmatics, where she specialized in scientific software used in medicinal chemistry, before returning to research and joining the ICR, where she brings her experience to develop new anticancer compounds.

Dr Sahra St John-Campbell is a postdoctoral research fellow working with Gurdip Bhalay in the Medicinal Chemistry 1 group. Prior to this she was Leverhulme Trust funded Research Fellow at University College London working in the Sheppard group. She completed her PhD at Imperial College London under the supervision of Dr James Bull in 2018. Following this she was awarded a Doctoral Prize Fellowship to continue her research on transient C(sp3)−H functionalisation, and went on to gain industrial experience in Process Chemistry at Pharmaron UK. Sahra received her MChem with Industrial Training at the University of Bath, including a year-long placement in medicinal chemistry at Takeda Cambridge and a final year research project with Prof. Christopher Frost.