Ben G. Davis

Benjamin Guy Davis FRS FMedSci (born 8 August 1970) is a Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Davis was privately educated at Nottingham High School followed by the University of Oxford where he was awarded Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry (with Chemical Pharmacology) in 1993 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1996 supervised by George Fleet [Wikidata]. He was a student of Keble College, Oxford.

After his PhD, Davis spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of J. Bryan Jones [Wikidata] at the University of Toronto, exploring protein chemistry and biocatalysis. In 1998 he returned to the United Kingdom to take up a lectureship at Durham University. In the autumn of 2001 he moved to the Dyson Perrins Laboratory and received a fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford. He was promoted to Professor in 2005.

His group's research centres on the chemical understanding and exploitation of biomolecular function (Synthetic Biology, Chemical Biology and Chemical Medicine), with an emphasis on carbohydrates and proteins. In particular, the group's interests encompass synthesis and methodology; target biomolecule synthesis; inhibitor/probe/substrate design; biocatalysis; enzyme and biomolecule mechanism; biosynthetic pathway determination; protein engineering; drug delivery; molecular biology; structural biology; cell biology; glycobiology; molecular imaging and in vivo biology.

Research in the Davis laboratory has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Medical Research Council, UCB-Celltech, AstraZeneca, the European Union, GlaxoSmithKline, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society. He has supervised numerous postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students to completion including Bhaskar Bhushan, Lukas Lercher, Yuya Lin, Mitul Patel, Régis Saliba, Samantha Shanley Filip Wyszynski, and Keisuke Yamamoto.

Awards and honours

Davis was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015. His certificate of election reads:

Professor Davis is noted for his chemical interrogation and manipulation of biological systems, particularly those that hinge on carbohydrates and proteins. He has developed selective and benign bond forming strategies that have been applied to biology, allowing the construction of synthetic biomolecules and bioconjugates; the creation of synthetic cells and viruses; and in vivo chemistry. These have enabled associated mechanistic details of protein and sugar biology to be elucidated and exploited for biotechnological applications.

He was also a recipient of the Mullard Award in 2005, the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2002 and the Meldola Medal and Prize in 1999 from the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.