Profile – Hafnium Zone

Education:

Twyford Church of England High School (2002-2009) and University of Leeds (2009-2013)
Qualifications:

Integrated Masters in Chemistry (MChem) with a year in industry
Work History:

AstraZeneca (A Large Pharmaceutical Company)
Current Job:

PhD Student in Chemoinformatics (funded by the Wellcome Trust)

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Designing new drugs is a jigsaw puzzle.

First, a biologist identifies a protein target in the human body that is associated with a particular disease.
Second, a chemist needs to find a small molecule with a suitable shape to bind to a cavity in this protein target.
This small molecule is the drug, and it will hopefully help cure the disease.

My job as a Chemoinformatician is to ensure that the chemist has a wide range of molecular ‘shapes’ available to them in order to give them a good chance of finding a good fit! By identifying new molecular shapes, I hope to help cure some of the trickier diseases (such as cancer).
My Typical Day:

I sit at my uber-powerful computer surrounded by four screens. This is my laboratory.
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I wake up and brush my teeth… wait… fast-forward…

I write Python programs which align molecules and describe their shapes
I write more Python programs which extract the shapes of protein cavities
I write even more Python programs which compare both of the above

Python Python Python Python.
(Python is a programming language)
What I'd do with the prize money:

Get people to see the art in science

Josh Meyers