Professor David Leys (PhD) - personal details

David did both his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Ghent, Belgium,  where he obtained a PhD in Biochemistry in 2000. Following a brief postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh with Prof. S.K. Chapman on a Belgian Government fellowship, David joined the University of Leicester Biochemistry department in 2001 as a tenure track research fellow. He obtained a Royal Society University Research fellowship in 2003 (until 2011) and a EMBO YIP award in 2004. He moved to Manchester in 2005 to take a position as honorary Reader in Molecular Enzymology. He is at present Research Group Leader of the Structural and Functional Systems research group and academic mentor of the X-ray crystallography facility. 

David is interested in the atomic basis of life, and uses structural biology combined with a range of biochemical techniques to understand how structure relates to function in biology.  David's research has focused on elucidation of novel mechanisms of interprotein electron transfer, the evolution of substrate channelling strategies, enzymatic H-tunnelling reactions,  and the basis of (transcriptional regulation) of dehalorespiration.

In recent years, David has established an independent research group with funding from BBSRC, ERC and the Royal Society, currently comprising ~5 postdoctoral scientists and 2 PhD students working in the area of protein structure-function analysis.