Henry Wilman.

Hi, I am a DPhil student at Oxford University, studying in the Oxford Protein Informatics group (see http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/research/proteins). My supervisors are Charlotte M. Deane and Jiye Shi.

My undergraduate degree was in Chemistry here in Oxford, during which I undertook a 9 month research project on UV spectroscopy with Prof. Gus Hancock in the Physical and Theoretical Chamistry Laboratory. I then spent 6 months studying in the SABS-IDC, followed by two short projects, one in my current group, and one with Prof. Chris Schofield and Dr. Emily Flashman studying oxygen dependent enzymes. I began my PhD project in October 2011.

Membrane proteins make up a significant proportion of drug targets, yet we have few experimental structures, and structure prediction is currently limited. Currently, I am interested in distortions in transmembrane helices - what causes them, and how they might be predicted. Kinks in alpha-helices are important to both structure and function, and I hope to be able to predict the position and flexibility of these.