Tom Brown, Sr.

Tom Brown FRSC and Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford. Currently, he is serving as the President of the Chemical Biology Interface Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is best known for his contribution in the field of DNA Repair, DNA Click chemistry, and in the application of Molecular genetics in forensics and diagnostics.

He co-founded three biotechnology companies: Oswel Research Products, ATDBio, and Primerdesign. As of January 2016, he is in the board of directors of last two.

Education and career Brown was born in Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire, and attended Broadway Grammar School there. As an undergraduate student, he attended University of Bradford to study chemistry where he obtained his bachelor's degree with first class honours, and was awarded the Griffin and George Prize for being the most outstanding graduate. In 1979, he earned his PhD from the same university, under the supervision of Prof Gordon Shaw. He then carried out his post-doctoral research at the University of Nottingham (with Leslie Crombie and Gerry Pattenden), University of Oxford (with John Jones), and at the University of Cambridge (with Olga Kennard OBE FRS). In 2013, Brown again moved, to take up position of the Professor of Nucleic acid chemistry at the University of Oxford where he now holds a joint position at the Department of Chemistry and Department of Oncology. Later he worked on the mutagenic effect of chemically modified DNA bases. In collaboration with Laurence Pearl, he elucidated the structural basis of excision repair by Uracil-DNA glycosylase. and diagnostics. Most recently, his group is focusing on the Click chemistry based chemical modification of DNA and its application in bionanotechnology sector.

As of January 2016, Brown has published more than 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals, with many of his papers appearing in highly selective journals like Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Cell, Nucleic Acids Research, JACS, and PNAS. His papers have been cited over 18,000 times and he has an h-index 68.

Awards and honours Brown was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry 2004: Brown received Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship from the Royal Society. 2008: Brown delivered Keynote Lecture at the Molecular Frontiers Symposium, in the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, A*STAR. 2009: Brown received RSC Interdisciplinary Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry 2015: Brown was awarded MPLS Impact lifetime Award by the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division (MPLS) of the University of Oxford 2016: Brown received the BBSRC Commercial Innovator of the Year 2016 award and BBSRC Innovator of the Year 2016 award.

Companies While working at the University of Edinburgh, Brown founded Oswel Research Products (the name 'Oswel' came from "Oligonucleotide synthesis" and "Wellcome Trust"), a company which was dedicated to automated DNA synthesis.

In 2004, Brown co-founded (along with two of his University of Southampton colleagues) Primerdesign, a company which designs and manufactures products for quantitative Real-time polymerase chain reaction.

In 2005, Brown founded ATDBio with an aim to synthesize chemically modified oligonucleotides for technical applications. As of June 2014, this company maintains two different labs at Southampton and Oxford.