Chief Executive, BBSRC

Douglas Kell was appointed Chief Executive of BBSRC on 1 October 2008. He was Top Scholar at Bradfield College, Berkshire (1966-71), and read Biochemistry at Oxford University (1971-5), where he also gained a Distinction in Chemical Pharmacology. He took his D. Phil. (1978) at the same institution, where he was a Senior Scholar of St John’s College, focussing on the development and exploitation of novel methods for the study of (mainly microbial) bioenergetics.

He was an SRC Postdoctoral Fellow and an SERC Advanced Fellow at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University), where he was appointed ‘New Blood’ Lecturer in 1983. He was promoted to Reader in 1988 and to a Personal Chair in 1992. From 1997-2002 he was Director of Research of the Institute of Biological Sciences in Aberystwyth.

In 2002 he took an RSC/EPSRC-funded Chair in Bioanalytical Sciences at UMIST, which merged with the Victoria University of Manchester in 2004 to form The University of Manchester, from which he is presently seconded. From 2005-2008 he was Director of the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology.

He has served on numerous scientific panels, including on the Programme Management Committees of 3 LINK schemes and the RCUK Basic Technology Panel, and was a member of BBSRC Council from 2001-6.

His scientific achievements include the development and exploitation of many novel analytical methods, such as the use of radio-frequency dielectric spectroscopy to determine microbial biomass; Aber Instruments, a company he co-founded to exploit this method, received the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in 1998. He has been a pioneer in a variety of areas of computational biology and experimental metabolomics, including in the use of evolutionary, closed-loop methods for optimisation. He also contributed to the discovery of the first bacterial cytokine.

He has published over 380 scientific papers; presently these have attracted >13,000 citations, 25 of them have over 100 citations each, and his H-index is 60.