Douglas Kell

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Douglas Kell
CBE FRSB FLSW
Born Douglas Bruce Kell
(1953-04-07) 7 April 1953 (age 71)[1]
Nationality British
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Education Bradfield College
Alma mater University of Oxford (BA, DPhil)
Thesis The Bioenergetics of Paracoccus denitrificans (1978)
Doctoral advisor <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
  • Stuart Ferguson[3]
  • Philip John
Doctoral students <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Known for CEO of BBSRC
Notable awards <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Spouse Dr Antje Wagner (m. 1989)[1]
Children one son, two daughters[1]
Website
dbkgroup.org

Douglas Bruce Kell CBE FRSB FLSW [7] (born 7 April 1953)[1] is a British biochemist and Research Professor of Systems Biology in the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool, and Chief Scientific Officer of Mellizyme Ltd. He was previously at the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester, based in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB).[8] He founded and led the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology. He served as chief executive officer (CEO) of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) from 2008 to 2013.[9][10][11][12][13][14]

Education

He was educated at Hydneye House in Sussex,[15] Bradfield College in Berkshire (where he was Top Scholar) and St John's College, Oxford. He graduated from the University of Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry in 1975 (with a Distinction in Chemical Pharmacology) followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in 1978 with a thesis on the Bioenergetics of Paracoccus denitrificans, supervised by Stuart Ferguson[3][16] and Philip John.[17]

From 1978 to 2002 he worked at Aberystwyth University, moving to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 2002 as an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)/Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Research Chair in Bioanalytical Sciences. He moved to the University of Liverpool in 2018.

Research and career

Kell's primary research interests are in systems biology, synthetic biology and computational biology.[2] He has also been heavily involved in the development of multivariate scientific instrumentation and the attendant machine learning software (his first paper on artificial neural networks was in 1992). He has written extensively on the role of microbes as agents of supposedly 'non-communicable', chronic infectious diseases. According to Google Scholar[2] his most cited peer-reviewed research papers are in functional genomics,[18] metabolomics[19] and the yeast genome.[20] He has also been involved in research to create a robot scientist[21] in collaboration with Ross King, Stephen Muggleton and Steve Oliver as well as several projects in systems biology.[22][23][24][25][26] He is heavily involved in the study of membrane transporters, and their necessary involvement in the transmembrane uptake of pharmaceutical drugs. An online talk and animation are available. He tends to choose scientific problems in which the prevailing orthodoxy is clearly incorrect. To this end, he has recently returned to the study of bioenergetics, summarising the detailed evidence against the prevailing wisdom of chemiosmotic coupling in oxidative and photosynthetic phosphorylation, replacing it with a protet-based model (an animation is available). His publications are mostly open access and are very widely cited, with an H-index at Google Scholar well in excess of 100. With Resia Pretorius he discovered the amyloidogenic clotting of blood, mostly caused by infectious agents even in supposedly non-infectious diseases; fibrin amyloid microclots (fibrinaloids) seem to be of major significance in Long COVID.

In 1988, he was a Founding Director of Aber Instruments, based on Aberystwyth Science Park (it was originally located at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Wales). In 2019 he was a Founding Director with Jacob Nathan of Mellizyme Ltd. He cofounded PhenUTest Ltd in 2021.

He is an Associated Scientific Director of the Centre for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark, where he runs the Flux Optimisation and BioAnalytics Group.

Kell's research has been funded by the EU, the BBSRC, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).[27][28] His former doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers include Pedro Pedrosa Mendes.[4] His freely available (downloadable here) monograph Belief: the baggage behind our being examines why (despite all available evidence) people believe crazy things (like Brexit)[29] and was published in 2018.[30]

Awards and honours

Kell was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours, for services to science and research.[7] Kell is also a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAS).

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. (subscription required)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Douglas Kell at Google Scholar
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 60728. p. . 31 December 2013.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Interview with Douglas Kell on the website of the Royal Society of Chemistry
  12. ↑ Douglas Kell from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library
  13. ↑ Douglas Kell publications from Europe PubMed Central
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Free to read
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Closed access
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Douglas B. Kell's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
  26. ↑ Douglas Kell's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
  27. ↑ UK Government Grants awarded to Douglas Kell, via Research Councils UK
  28. ↑ Grants awarded to Douglas Kell by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Kell DB, Welch GR (2018) Belief: the baggage behind our being. OSF preprints doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/PNXCS open access publication - free to read


Government offices
Preceded by CEO of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
2008–2013		 Succeeded by
Jackie Hunter
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