Rate My Professor Richard Berry

Berry leads the Oxford Molecular Motors research group, located at the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery. His research centers on the physics of large molecular machines essential to life processes, particularly rotary molecular motors such as the bacterial flagellar motor and F₁F₀ ATP-synthase. He investigates torque generation, motor assembly, maintenance, control, and function in living cells. Employing cutting-edge techniques like optical tweezers, magnetic tweezers, single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, laser dark-field microscopy, interferometry, and digital holographic microscopy, his work extends to developing tools for medical diagnostics, lipid bilayer systems, synthetic biology, and biophysical instrumentation. Berry lectures on Biological Physics in undergraduate and fourth-year courses, heads the Biophysics Practical laboratories in the Physics Department, provides physics tutorials at St Catherine’s College, and supervises doctoral students.

Notable publications include “Structure and mechanism of the Zorya anti-phage defence system” (Nature, 2024), “Molecular structure of the intact bacterial flagellar basal body” (Nature Microbiology, 2021), “A new class of biological ion-driven rotary molecular motors with 5:2 symmetry” (Frontiers in Microbiology, 2022), and “Towards a perfusion system for functional study of membrane proteins with independent control of the electrical and chemical transmembrane potential” (Biophysical Reviews, 2025).