Inaugural veski fellow joins board of directors

On behalf of the veski chairman Professor Snow Barlow and the board of directors I am delighted to advise that Professor Andrew B. Holmes has been appointed to the veski board of directors as the first representative of the veski innovation fellows.

Andrew Holmes Biography

Professor Andrew Holmes is a Melbourne University Laureate Professor of Chemistry, CSIRO Fellow and Distinguished Research Fellow (Imperial College, London).

Professor Holmes was awarded the inaugural veski innovation fellowship and took up his position at the Bio21 Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Institute in late 2004.

Andrew was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne and completed a PhD degree with Professor Franz Sondheimer at University College London. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the final stages of the synthesis of vitamin B12 with Professor A. Eschenmoser. He was at Cambridge for thirty-two years, then moved to Imperial College from where he is on long term leave of absence seconded as an ARC Federation Fellow and Inaugural veski fellow at the Bio21 Institute in the University of Melbourne and CSIRO Molecular and Health Technologies, Clayton.

Professor Holmes's research interests span a range of natural and non-natural synthetic targets. His polymer research spans a range of functional and electroactive polymers. A recent interest has been the use of phosphoinositides to probe downstream signalling processes in protein kinases that has revealed many new proteins involved in intracellular signalling pathways. The work of his group on polymeric light emitting diodes has excited considerable attention and spawned a totally new research area. Further potential applications of conjugated polymers in the fields of field effect transistors and solar cells are also possible.

Professor Holmes is a co-recipient of the Descartes Prize 2003. In May, 2000 he was elected FRS. He was appointed AM in the Australia Day Honours List in 2004 and he was elected FAA in March 2006 and FTSE in November 2006. He was Chairman of the Editorial Board of Chemical Communications from 2000-2003 and he has been an Associate Editor of Organic Letters since April 2006. He was appointed a Melbourne University Laureate Professor of Chemistry in 2009 in recognition of a distinguished career in science and his significant contribution and achievements in research and leadership.