People

Dr Christopher Serpell	Dr. Serpell achieved his DPhil in Inorganic Chemistry with Prof. Paul Beer at the University of Oxford in 2010. He remained there as an EPSRC PhD+ Awardee, before moving to Prof. Hanadi Sleiman’s group at McGill University, Montreal in 2011 on a Tomlinson, and then a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship. He returned to Oxford in 2014 to work with Prof. Ben Davis FRS as a Skłodowska-Curie Experienced Researcher within the RADDEL network. He was appointed to his first faculty position as a Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of Kent in 2015, and moved to UCL School of Pharmacy in 2023 where he is an Associate Professor of Drug Discovery.
James Williamson	James is a second year PhD student in the Serpell group looking at the medicinal applications of sequence-defined polyphosphoesters (phosphoestamers), including for chemotherapeutic encapsulation and for the modulation of the KRASG12D-RAF protein-protein interaction in cancer.
Henry Rose	Henry studied Chemistry at the University of Sussex, graduating in 2022 and starting in industry soon after. He worked in the PET Radiopharmaceutical industry for over 2 years when he decided to return to academia in November 2024 in the Serpell Group at UCL. Henry is working on synthesising chemically modified nucleic acids to then synthesise analogues of a therapeutically relevant aptamer with applications in lung cancer.
Kidus Biru	Kidus studied Pharmacy at the University College London, graduating in 2023. After a year of training at GSK and Day-Lewis to become a GPhC registered Pharmacist, he returned to UCL to start his PhD. Kidus’ work aims to leverage phosphoramidite chemistry to create new adjuvants for lipid nanoparticles, aiming to create more effective durable vaccines for mucosal delivery.