Rate My Professor David Palmer

David Palmer is a Professor in the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde. He earned a Master of Chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 2001 and a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 2008. Before pursuing his doctorate, he worked as a synthesis chemist at Norbrook Laboratories. From 2008 to 2011, he conducted postdoctoral research at Aarhus University in Denmark and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. In 2012, he was awarded a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, which brought him to the Department of Physics at the University of Strathclyde. He joined the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry as a Lecturer in 2014, progressing to Senior Lecturer in 2019, Reader in 2022, and Professor in 2025. Additionally, he serves as Founding Director of Dxcover Ltd., a University of Strathclyde spin-out company specializing in cancer diagnostics through spectroscopic liquid biopsies.

Professor Palmer's research focuses on developing and applying molecular simulation and molecular informatics methods to tackle industrially relevant challenges at the biochemistry-chemical physics interface. His collaborations include computational drug discovery projects with AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer, as well as enzyme design for food manufacturing with Chr. Hansen A/S. His expertise encompasses theoretical and computational chemistry, solvation thermodynamics, molecular simulation, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, drug discovery, biochemistry, and machine learning. Notable publications include 'Physics-based solubility prediction for organic molecules' in Chemical Reviews (2025), 'Query matters: how selection strategies influence active learning in drug discovery' in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (2026), and contributions to studies on multi-centre evaluations of liquid biopsies for early detection of brain and colorectal tumors. He has received the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship in 2012 and the Chemical Structures Association Trust Grant in 2014.