Talking About NMR Applications Development at Cambridge with ProVC Prof. Jeremy Sanders.

Talking About NMR Applications Development at Cambridge with ProVC Prof. Jeremy Sanders.

One on the high points during my CAPREx Fellowship in Cambridge was a meeting with the Pro VC of the University of Cambridge Prof. Jeremy Sanders. This meeting was made possible by the gracious introduction by Prof. Ivan Addae-Mensah, the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana. Prof. Addae-Mensah, mentor of mine, happened to have studied in the same department as Prof. Sander way back in time. The meeting was rather easy to arrange considering his very busy schedule.

Meeting at a time that I had a fairly good grasp of the concepts of the NMR technique, I was surely going to test my wits with the highly accomplished Professor of Chemistry with two very advance books on NMR practice. Through the conversation in became clear that the Chemistry Department at the University is the worlds foremost centre for the developments of NMR applications. The latest groundbreaking discovery using solid state NMR for bone formation in mammals was made by Prof. Melinda Duer which Implicates PolyADP Ribose in Biomineralization (Science 2014). 

The Chemistry department was the first to acquire the first commercial NMR machine in 1957 which was a 40 MHz machine. In 1964, 100 MHz machine was also acquired. During the PhD studies of Prof. Sanders, the department of Chemistry acquired the first Fourier Transformed 100 MHz NMR machine from Varian 1971. The department was also the first to acquire a 400 MHz NMR machine in 1980 before acquiring the 600 MHz in 1990. Currently the department has more than 15 NMR machine including 200, 400, 500, 600, 700 and 950 MHz machines. This definitely the home of NMR applications and I am happy to have studied a bit that.

Of Chemical Physics and Nuclear magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR): "Learning a new technique is like learning a language"

Of Chemical Physics and Nuclear magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR): "Learning a new technique is like learning a language"

The CAPREx Postdoctoral fellowship programme came up at the time in my research development where I was searching for a new expertise. With my background in Developmental Biochemistry and now working on Natural Product Chemistry, I needed to learn how to determine the structures of compounds.

So I arrived in Cambridge in Spring time when the city is most lively.  I came in from a visit to the ETH-Zurich where I did some work on Mycobacterial Proteomics using Mass Spectrometry. 

Working with Dr. Finian Leeper has been excellent. Learning a new technique is indeed like learning a language. Luckily for me, the Department of Chemistry in Cambridge has been the home of NMR applications development (see my second post for me details) and so many excellent textbooks have been written by former and current faculty members on NMR techniques.  I spent a lot of time reading up the basic principles of NMR from a book by Dudley Williams and Ian Fleming. Dr. Leeper then took me through hands-on spectral analysis using real data.

I completed my study in Cambridge with a lot of excitement about my newly acquired language. This not only adds a major intellectual latitude to my research but also creates new opportunities to train others. As an aside, my pursuit of Chemical Physics drew me into Cosmology as the principles in both field mirror each other. And so I have acquired as many books on Cosmology as I did for NMR. I will encourage my colleague fellows and future fellows to strongly consider using their fellowship time in Cambridge to acquire something completely different from their past experiences, especially as Cambridge boast of world experts in almost all area of academic disciplines. I hope to continue to expand on my collaborations with Dr. Leeper in this exciting field of drug discovery for infectious diseases.