Rate My Professor Charlie Bond

Professor Charlie Bond is a Professor in the School of Molecular Sciences at the University of Western Australia. He earned a BSc (Hons) First Class in Chemistry with Industrial Experience from the University of Manchester in 1992 and a PhD in Protein Crystallography from the same university in 1996, with a thesis titled 'Trypanothione reductase: Structure, specificity and approaches to inhibitor identification.' After his doctorate, he served as a postdoctoral researcher in Sydney and as a research fellow at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, UK. Recruited to UWA in 2006 as a structural biologist, Bond's career has focused on advancing understanding of biomolecular structures.

Bond specializes in structural biology, encompassing protein chemistry, molecular biology, biological chemistry, protein-protein interactions, protein-RNA interactions, crystallography, computational modelling, biophysics, synchrotron science, enzyme structure, function and inhibition, DNA repair mechanisms, and protein-nucleic acid interactions. His research determines three-dimensional structures of nucleic acids and proteins to elucidate molecular functions, supporting drug design for infectious diseases and insights into DNA and RNA errors for cancer treatments. He teaches undergraduate units, supervises honours and PhD students in Chemistry and Biochemistry, and has obtained funding from NHMRC Project Grants, ARC Linkage and Discovery Projects, ARC LIEF Grants, and Cancer Council WA, including projects on molecular safety catches for RNA modification and modulation of the NONO oncogene. Key publications include 'Functional domains of NEAT1 architectural lncRNA induce paraspeckle assembly through phase separation' (2018), 'A combinatorial amino acid code for RNA recognition by pentatricopeptide repeat proteins' (2012), 'Paraspeckles: nuclear bodies built on long noncoding RNA' (2009), 'Paraspeckles: where long noncoding RNA meets phase separation' (2018), and 'ALINE: a WYSIWYG protein-sequence alignment editor for publication-quality alignments' (2009). Bond received the School of Molecular Sciences Award for Research Mentorship in 2023, serves as Section Editor for Acta Crystallographica Section D, chairs UWA's Gender Equity Working Group, and is Athena Swan Academic Lead. He has developed computer software for biomolecular structure analysis and contributed datasets to the Protein Data Bank.