Anthony Watts 2014 International Biophysics Congress

Anthony Watts

Tony Watts read a B.Sc. then a Ph.D. in biophysics in the Astbury Department of Biophysics, Leeds University, UK from 1968 - 1975, followed by post doctoral research for 5-years at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics, Göttingen, Germany. In 1980 he took up a position in the Biochemistry Department, Oxford University, UK where he is now a Professor and the CW Maplethorpe Fellow in Biological Sciences, St Hugh's College. Since his PhD he has had an interest in both model and biological membranes, using a wide range of biophysical methods to characterize vesicular, model, reconstituted and natural membranes. In early work, lipid-protein interactions were investigated exploiting ESR approaches to relate lipid dynamics to function. In Oxford, newly developed wide-line NMR was developed to charaterize surface specificity of lipid-protein and peptide interactions in membranes. More recently, novel solid state NMR approaches have been developed and exploited to resolve high resolution conformational and dynamic details directly of ligand-targets interactions in the absence of target structure, with GPCRs being the current focus. He has published using a wide range of biophysical methodologies, with a focus on understanding structural explanation of biological function. He is the Managing Editor of the European Biophysics Journal, Chair of the British Biophysical Society and member of the executive committee of the European Biophysical Societies Association (EBSA).