Laurence Harris Pearl - Biography#

Laurence Pearl is an internationally recognised structural biologist and biochemist who has made significant contributions to the present understanding of the structural basis for specificity and mechanism in the systems that carry out DNA repair, signal transduction, and chaperone-dependent protein activation in cells. His work exemplifies an integrated approach in which structural, biochemical and molecular biology techniques are combined to answer fundamental questions of biological mechanism and function.

Professor Pearl began his research career at Birkbeck College, University of London under the supervision of Tom Blundell, and, after postdoctoral research at the Institute of Cancer Research, started his own laboratory at University College London in 1989, becoming Professor of Structural Biology in 1996. In 1999 he moved to the Institute of Cancer Research in Chelsea, where, along with David Barford, he established a new Section of Structural Biology, which has become over the succeeding decade one of the most productive structural biology departments in the UK, achieving international recognition. In August 2009 Prof. Pearl was appointed Head of the new School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex. His laboratory relocated to the world-renowned Genome Damage and Stability Centre in Sussex, at the end of September 2010.

Professor Pearl's contributions were recognised in 2008 with his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO). He is a founder and the Chief Scientific Officer of Domainex Ltd, a contract research company that was named UK Bio-entrepreneurial Company of the Year by the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) in 2007. In 2010 he was one of only 20 scientists worldwide to receive an inaugural Senior Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust.