Rate My Professor Bruce Turnbull

Professor Bruce Turnbull is Professor of Biomolecular Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds. He received a first-class BSc (Hons) degree in Chemistry from the University of St Andrews in 1995 and a PhD in biological carbohydrate chemistry from the same university in 1998, working with Professor Rob Field. He then held a Wellcome Trust International Prize Travelling Research Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles (1998-2001), followed by a Wellcome Trust PDRA position in the School of Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Leeds (2001-2004). In 2004, he moved to the School of Chemistry as Lecturer in Chemical Biology (2004-2005), became a Royal Society University Research Fellow (2005-2013), Associate Professor (2013-2016), and Professor of Biomolecular Chemistry in 2016.

His research spans synthetic chemistry, protein engineering, and biophysical studies of protein-glycan interactions, particularly in the context of the cellular glycocalyx. Current interests include carbohydrate chemistry, protein-carbohydrate interactions, multivalent interactions, and engineering biology. Projects encompass enzymatic synthesis of modified glycans for glycomimetic drugs and diagnostics; site-specific chemical and enzymatic protein modification for therapeutics like antibody-drug conjugates; analysis of multivalent protein-carbohydrate binding, such as in cholera toxin; and re-engineering AB5 bacterial toxins for targeted intracellular delivery to neurons or tumors. He received the Royal Society of Chemistry Carbohydrate Award in 2013 and the Bader Prize in 2024 for bioorthogonal approaches in engineering functional protein and carbohydrate systems. He chaired the RSC Carbohydrate Interest Group in 2016-2017, represents the UK on the European Carbohydrate Organisation, and co-organised the Royal Society Theo Murphy Meeting on Synthetic Glycobiology in 2018. Notable publications include Multivalent glycoconjugates as anti-pathogenic agents (Chemical Society Reviews, 2012) and A Protein-Based Pentavalent Inhibitor of the Cholera Toxin B-subunit (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2014).