Prof Ed Tate completed his PhD under the guidance of Prof Steve Ley at the University of Cambridge in the fields of methodology and total synthesis, and undertook postdoctoral research in Paris. Initially he was an 1851 Research Fellow in the group of Prof Sam Zard (Ecole Polytechnique) studying radical cascades in total synthesis, and later a Howard Trust Fellow in the lab of Dr Annie Kolb (Institut Pasteur), working on the role of DNA secondary structure in transcriptional activation. He then took up a position in the lab of Prof Robin Leatherbarrow in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London, and subsequently founded a new research group in chemical biology and chemical proteomics as a BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellow; he remained at Imperial to further develop his research group, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2010, Reader in Chemical Biology in 2012, and Professor of Chemical Biology in 2014.
Ed's research focuses on the design and application of novel chemical approaches to understand biology, particularly post-translational modification of proteins and the manipulation of multi-protein complexes, and approaches for target identification in complex systems. More than 50 researchers in his group are engaged in multiple aspects of chemical biology and medicinal chemistry, with an emphasis on the roles of protein modification in cancer, inflammation, and degenerative and infectious diseases, and funded by grants from government, biomedical research charities and industry. Ed is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Society of Biology, and is a past recipient of the Wain Medal (2012), the RSC MedImmune Protein and Peptide Science Award (2013), and the Norman Heatley Award (2014) for his work in the fields of chemical biology, chemical proteomics, and medicinal chemistry.