Prof. Keith Willison Imperial College London, UK

Prof Keith Willison is Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College. He is a foundig member of the Imperial College Institute of Chemical Biology (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/chemical-biology) and the associated EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre (http://www.icb-cdt.co.uk/). He gained extensive experience of management and leadership roles in basic research, clinical... read moreresearch and medicine at the Institute of Cancer Research (1981-2011) where he was ICR Head of Laboratories (1995-2005) and a Trustee of the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital (1995-2008). He has studied chaperone-assisted protein folding in eukaryotic cytoplasm; particularly the CCT folding machine. He takes a multidisciplinary approach to studying protein machines; in vivo genetics, enzyme kinetics, time resolved and single molecule spectroscopy, single-particle electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography and proteomics. His most notable scientific achievement has been the development of an energy landscape model for actin folding dynamics which explains the spring-like properties and symmetry-breaking nature of the actin filament.