Neil Thomson

University of Leeds

Neil H Thomson received his PhD in Biophysics under the direction of Prof. Mervyn Miles FRS, from the University of Bristol, UK in 1994. He developed Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) techniques to image and understand cereal protein structure and carried out the first in situ imaging of a biomolecular process by atomic force microscopy (AFM): degradation of starch by amylase. Subsequently, he was awarded a NATO fellowship to carry out postdoctoral research with Prof. Paul Hansma at the University of California Santa Barbara, whose lab was a leading exponent in the development and application of AFM to biological systems. In collaboration with Prof. Carlos Bustamante’s group, our team were the first to image the fundamental gene expression process of DNA transcription by RNA polymerase at the molecular level using AFM. 
Further postdocs followed at the University of Nottingham (1998) and the EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (1999), before he secured a 5-year Advanced Research Fellowship from the EPSRC, UK. He took this award to the University of Leeds, where he is currently Associate Professor and Reader in Biological Physics and Bionanotechnology, with a joint position between the Schools of Dentistry and Physics & Astronomy. His research expertise and leadership in AFM has been key to the founding of the Leeds AFM facility, which is now housed within high spec, ultra-low noise laboratories within the new interdisciplinary Bragg Centre for Materials Research. He was a co-founder of the SPM section of the Royal Microscopical Society (RMS), which is affiliated to the European Microscopy Society (EMS). He is an Editorial Board member of Nature Scientific Reports for Biological Physics since 2014.
His research group is expert in the development and application of AFM applied to biological systems, biomaterials and nanostructures. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles and 5 book chapters, with more than 8100 citations and an h-index of 42 (Google Scholar). His group’s current research interests focus on DNA nanotechnology and the mechanobiology of collagen systems. We aim to understand the structure and function of these biomolecular materials down to the molecular level with a view to development of new technologies and therapies for healthcare applications.