Dr Bill Broadhurst

Bill has been an Official Fellow since 2005 and is our Deputy Senior Tutor, Director of Studies for Biological Natural Sciences, and one of our Admissions Tutors in Science. He is Associate Professor at the University's Department of Biochemistry.

Biography

Bill's enthusiasm for science was ignited in Yorkshire at the age of 7 when his father showed him what happens when a lump of metallic sodium is dropped into a bucket of water. The resulting explosion had unexpected consequences, one being his arrival as an undergraduate at University College, Oxford to study Chemistry in 1982. His interests gradually became less incendiary, leading to research on the effects of magnetic fields on free radical reactions, followed by post–doctoral work on biological applications of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy at both Cambridge and Oxford. At the University of Cambridge, he has been a supervisor for MST/VST IA Molecules in Medical Science since 2005, and from 2009, supervisor for the NST IA Biology of Cells course. In 2015 he became a University Lecturer, promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2023. Outside college, for the last ten years he has been involved in the life of St James' Church, Wulfstan Way.

Teaching

Bill teaches first year Emmanuel students the 'Molecules in Medical Science' course. At the University he teaches first year Mathematical Biology and Molecules in Medical Science, second year Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and third year Biochemistry. He is also academic co–ordinator for the Sutton Trust Summer School in Biochemistry, Pathology and Pharmacology.

Research

Since 1995, Bill has used NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) to investigate the structure, dynamics and interactions of proteins in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge. His current research focuses on Structural Dynamics of Modular Polyketide Synthases. These huge proteins organize clusters of catalytic domains into assembly lines that can produce a range of bioactive products, from antibiotics to toxins. They have with great potential for synthetic biology to produce novel "unnatural" natural products. Read Bill's recent journal publications in Nature: Scientific Reports 9, 2325 Moretto, et al (2019); Chemical Communications: Moretto, et al (2017); and the Biochemical Journal: 473, 1097 Vance, et al (2016).