Biomedical Researcher, Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge

Dr Martyn Symmons is a Biomedical Researcher in the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He divides his time between labs in the Departments of Biochemistry and Veterinary Medicine. His research field is Structural Biology - determining the 3D structures of molecular components of human cells and invading bacterial pathogens to facilitate drug discovery.

Previously he was a Research Fellow in the Department of Pathology. It was then that he solved the first complete structure of a complex bacterial antibiotic resistance pump. This study was published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

For several years subsequent to that, Dr Symmons worked at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) on improving the distribution of 3D structural data through open access worldwide databases. The EBI is an institute run by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory which is based in Germany but is an international treaty organization funded by 20 countries including a large contribution from the UK.

He is now funded on an MRC grant to determine the structures of human proteins involved in sepsis and inflammation. He is a peer-reviewer of papers for open access journals, and grant applications for UK research councils.