Two new science Fellows

10 September 2018

With the start of the new academic year fast approaching, we’re delighted to welcome another two new Tutorial Fellows to the Hertford community.

Biochemistry: Professor Petros Ligoxygakis

Professor Ligoxygakis has studied at the Universities of Athens, Crete and Oxford. He joined Oxford’s Department of Biochemistry in 2003 to establish a lab studying innate immunity, the first-line host defence common in all higher animals. The Ligoxygakis Lab conducts research using a genetically tractable model system – the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster – to determine how the host senses and responds to pathogens in the first few hours following infection. Petros joins us from being a Fellow at St Cross College.

Chemistry: Dr Fernanda Duarte

Dr Duarte joins us from the University of Edinburgh, where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow and leads a research group in computation chemistry. Her current research focuses on the development of computational platforms for the modelling and design of biomimetic catalysts.

Fernanda completed her PhD in 2012 at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her doctoral research focused on  the formulation and application of theoretical frameworks to characterise chemical processes by employing Density Functional Theory (DFT) and hybrid Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics (QM/MM) approaches.

During her PhD, Fernanda was granted a Fulbright Scholarship and the L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science award. In 2013, she was invited to the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting and received a fellowship from the Bert and Kuggie Vallee Foundation. Between 2012-2015, she was a postdoctoral research in the Kamerlin group at Uppsala University before moving to Oxford’s Department of Chemistry, where she held a Newton International Fellowship.