Metabolic Profiling Forum, Directors
Dr Andy Nicholls
As part of Jeremy Nicholson’s team, Dr Andy Nicholls obtained his PhD from the University of London and was instrumental in the proof of principal model that resulted in the establishment of the Consortium on Metabonomic Toxicology (COMET). Following further studies into the application of metabonomics, he became an associate director for Metabometrix Ltd, a biotechnology spin-out company from Imperial College London . This role led to him taking a senior research position at GlaxoSmithKline where he now heads the Biochemistry and In Vitro toxicology groups in the investigative arm of Safety Assessment. His principal areas of research involve the study of metabolic alterations in complex, multicellular organisms and the determination of the root-cause mechanisms of drug-induced toxicity.
Andy was a co-founder of both the Metabolic Profiling Forum and the Metabomeeting conference series. With collaborators he was instrumental in the inception of the standardisation practises for metabolomics (now the Metabolomics Standards Initiative) and remains actively involved in the continuation of this work. From 2010 he takes on the position of the President of the organization running the highly successful SMASH NMR conference, of which he was co-chair in 2007 & 2009.
Dr Julian Griffin
Dr Julian L. Griffin is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and University lecturer at the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge. He is also a group leader in the Cambridge Systems Biology Centre. A chemist by first degree, he gained his D. Phil in Biochemistry with Prof. Sir George Radda studying brain metabolism using 13C NMR spectroscopy. He held a Harvard Medical school/ Massachusetts General Hospital fellowship with Prof. Doug Lewandowski, studying cardiac metabolism by 13C NMR before joining Prof. Jeremy Nicholson’s group at Imperial College London as a NERC postdoctoral fellow and then Royal Society University Research Fellow. He is developing NMR and mass spectrometry based metabolomic tools for identifying metabolic biomarkers associated with disease, drug toxicity and understanding the control of metabolic pathways. He also has wide experience in multivariate statistical processes required to process the data. In addition he has used stable isotopes to follow metabolic fluxes both in vitro and in vivo. He is a chair of a sub-committee of the Metabolomic Standards Initiative which aims to define the information required to describe a metabolomic experiment. He is also a board member of the Metabolomic Society and has co-organized the first two Metabomeeting conferences of which he is a co-founder. He is on the editorial board of Biomarkers. He teaches chemistry and biochemistry to undergraduates and is also involved in developing a fourth year undergraduate course in systems biology as a Part 3 option in the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge.
Dr John Haselden
Dr John Haselden is currently Head of the Department of Investigative Preclinical Toxicology and a director within Safety Assessment at GSK based in Ware, Herts. He has worked in the pharmaceutical industry (GSK and its heritage companies) since completion of his PhD in lipid biochemistry and drug metabolism at the University of London. He has worked predominantly as a regulatory toxicologist and project manager over the last 16 years, although for the last 10 years has been responsible for evaluating and developing GSK’s worldwide capability to carry out metabolic profiling work in support of numerous research initiatives and various drug development projects. He serves on a number of editorial boards and external bodies related to Safety Biomarkers (ABPI & EfPIA), Stem Cells for Safer Medicines, and as a scientific advisor on Omics and Predictive Toxicology programs under the Framework and IMI banners. He was the instigator and a co-founder of the Metabolic Profiling Forum.
Professor Roy Goodacre
Roy Goodacre is Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Manchester, UK. His group’s main areas of research are broadly within analytical biotechnology, and in the combination of a variety of modern spectroscopies (including MS, IR and Raman) and advanced chemometrics and machine learning to the explanatory analysis of complex biological systems within a metabolomics and proteomics context. Roy is the Editor-in-chief of the journal Metabolomics, onthe editorial board of the Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis, and currently co-editing an issue of Chemical Society Reviews on SERS with Prof Duncan Graham. He is also one of the founding directors of the Metabolomics Society.