Professor Sir Alan Fersht FRS
Alan Fersht
Professor Sir Alan Fersht FRS is the Herchel Professor of Organic Chemistry at Cambridge University and Director of the Medical Research Council’s Centre for Protein Engineering.
His research interests lie in the area of protein engineering and protein folding, and in particular he looks at the role of protein misfolding and instability in cancer and disease.
Professor Fersht, who is often described as the founder of protein engineering, was the first to apply site-directed mutagenesis to analyse the structure and activity of proteins.
Among numerous accolades, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and he was knighted in 2003 for his pioneering work on protein folding.