Chris Dobson

Sir Christopher Martin Dobson (8 October 1949 – 8 September 2019) was a British chemist, who was the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and Master of St John's College, Cambridge. He completed a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he was a student of Keble College, Oxford and Merton College, Oxford.

He is well known for his serendipitous discovery that ordinary proteins can misfold and aggregate to form amyloid structures.

Dobson authored and co-authored over 800 papers and review articles, including 38 in Nature, Science and Cell, which have been cited over 100,000 times. his H-index is 153.

In 2012, Dobson founded the Cambridge Centre for Misfolding Diseases,

In 2016, Chris Dobson co-founded Wren Therapeutics, a biotechnology start-up company whose mission is to find new therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease.

Awards and honours Dobson was knighted in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours for his contributions to science and higher education. In 2009, Dobson was awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society "for his outstanding contributions to the understanding of the mechanisms of protein folding and mis-folding, and the implications for disease", and in 2014 he received both the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Feltrinelli International Prize for Medicine. Dobson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1996. His nomination reads:

Dobson's other accolades include:

Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize, The Royal Society of Chemistry, 1981 Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Research Scholar, 1992 Silver Medal, Italian Society of Biochemistry, 2002 Honorary Fellow, Trinity College Dublin, 2013 Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, 2013 Honorary Fellow, Darwin College, University of Cambridge, 2014 Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), 2014 Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for Medicine, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome, 2014 Member of the American Philosophical Society, 2018

Mentorship Dobson mentored and supervised many notable PhD students and post-doctoral researchers, many of whom became renowned experts in their own field. These include:

Carol V. Robinson at the University of Oxford Sheena E. Radford at the University of Leeds Cait MacPhee at the University of Edinburgh Clare Grey at the University of Cambridge Brenda A. Schulman at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany Michele Vendruscolo at the University of Cambridge Fabrizio Chiti at the University of Florence Andrew Baldwin at the University of Oxford

Personal life Dobson met his wife, Dr Mary Dobson (née Schove) at Merton College at the University of Oxford. They had two sons, Richard and William.

He died on 8 September 2019, from cancer, at Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, near Surrey.