Highlights from 2017

2017 has been a very successful year for our research group. Here are some highlights:


We successfully graduate 7 PhD students. We are very proud of this and this is a record for our group and won't be beaten for some time. Congratulations to:

  • Dr Neha Dhami (2017) Interference of central metabolism (TCA cycle) to influence CHO cell productivity. UCB.
  • Dr Chloe Westley (2017). Raman Spectroscopy and its Enhancement Techniques for Direct Monitoring of Biotransformations. BBSRC.
  • Dr Abdu Subaihi (2017) The Development of Enhanced Raman Scattering for the Analysis of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Compounds in Biofluids.  Saudi Arabia Government.
  • Dr Ewa Szula (2017) Metabolic profiling and imaging of CHO cells for fusion protein production. BBSRC.
  • Dr Robert Eendebak (2017) The potential relationships between hormone biomarkers and functional and health outcomes of ageing – a multinational longitudinal cohort study of ageing in men. BBSRC.
  • Dr Heidi Fisk (2017) Raman Spectroscopy for the Direct Monitoring of Microbial Biotransformations. BBSRC CASE with GSK.
  • Dr Mekhala Spencer (2017) The development of Raman spectroscopy for monitoring industrial biopharmaceuticals. BBSRC CASE with Pall.

We are very grateful to all funders for these PhD projects.


In 2017 we also saw our first retirement:

  • We sincerely wish Dr Mark Barley a very long and wonderful retirement and we wish you lots of joyous time with your family. We also look forward to seeing Mark from time to time in the MIB and hearing more of his travels.

Some key papers published in 2017 include:


We successfully visited our favourite analytical journal 4 times in 2017, and one of these featured on the Front Cover:


Finally, Roy was made a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW) in May and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in October.