Ed Tate
GROUP LEADER - SATELLITE
Ed is Professor of Chemical Biology at Imperial College London and a satellite group leader at the Francis Crick Institute. He leads a team of over 60 scientists across Imperial and the Crick working on novel tools to understand and manipulate living systems, with a focus on drug target discovery and validation.
Following a BSc degree in chemistry at the University of Durham, Ed undertook his PhD in organic chemistry and methodology at the University of Cambridge under the guidance of Prof. Steve Ley. He then worked for two years with Prof. Sam Zard at Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) on an 1851 Research Fellowship, on radical chemistry and natural product total synthesis. The award of a Howard Trust Research Fellowship enabled him to study molecular microbiology and the role of DNA secondary structure in transcriptional activation with Dr Annie Kolb at the Pasteur Institute (Paris), and following this period of training in biological research he moved to Imperial College London to work on protein chemistry and chemical biology with Prof. Robin Leatherbarrow.
In 2006 he was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellowship; in 2010 he was appointed Senior Lecturer, promoted to Reader in Chemical Biology in 2012, and to Professor of Chemical Biology in 2014. He is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Chemistry (FRSC) and of Biology (FRSB), and Director of Imperial’s Centre for Drug Discovery Science, and of the Imperial MRes in Drug Discovery and Development course.
He received the 2012 Wain Medal, the 2013 MedImmune Protein and Peptide Science Award, the 2014 Norman Heatley Award, a 2015 Cancer Research UK Programme Foundation Award, the 2019 Sir David Cooksey Translation Prize, and the 2020 Corday-Morgan Prize, in recognition of his group’s research in chemical biology and drug discovery. He sits on the Scientific Advisory Boards of numerous institutes and biotech companies, and he was the founder and CSO of Myricx Pharma Ltd, a drug discovery company recently established to translate novel findings from his lab.
