Hartshorn Jones Innovation Fund

During his time at York, funding of this kind gave Mike the opportunity to explore and develop his abilities in molecular graphics, modelling and chemoinformatics.  He subsequently developed key software infrastructure in the UK biopharmaceutical industry, and was instrumental at the software company, Dotmatics, whose methods have had a global impact on research and discovery in the pharmaceutical industry.

Now, through the Hartshorn Jones Innovation Fund, Mike and his family are keen to support the next generation of bright minds in biochemistry. 

Dr Mike Hartshorn said: “I’m delighted to be able to fund additional research and training within the York Structural Biology Laboratory and also other departments at the University. The opportunities I received from funding such as this, when I was in Rod’s group, gave me the best possible start for my career. During a recent visit to the lab, I was impressed to see the progress made by post-graduates in learning truly interdisciplinary skills that had been enabled by the fund.”

Recent decades have seen accelerating invention and deployment of chemical and biophysical methods to answer questions in biology and medicine, including molecular graphics and modelling, chemoinformatics, imaging, and high-throughput crystallography and more recently cryo-electron microscopy.  

There are great opportunities for early stage, inventive scientists to make significant contributions in the development and deployment of these methods, which can have real impact on their personal development as well as scientific research and benefit to wider society.  However, the constraints of conventional training and funding can limit the opportunities for a student to immerse themselves in a new technology and find out what they are capable of. 

The Hartshorn Jones Innovation Fund provides small grants of £500 - £2,000 to enable young York researchers to explore new methods and areas of chemical biology. The fund supports three areas:

• for a current York student or early researcher (within 5 years of PhD Award) to explore a technology for chemical biology which is new to them. There is no restriction on how funds are used to achieve this - examples include attending a conference, visiting a company or a UK laboratory, purchasing hardware or software, or gaining access to a new facility.
• to a PI for purchase of computer hardware to support successive years of 4th year Masters research projects.
• For 4th year MChem students to work in a research lab for 4-6 weeks during the summer vacation between their 3rd and 4th years (cost £1,000-1,500) learning a new technique in chemical biology. This will allow the student to gain research experience that may help them develop their career aspirations.

Funding has so far been used to purchase well-configured computers to develop new computational methods for Cryo-EM studies, allowing in-house datasets to be processed very quickly.

For example, the Parkin Group, a bioinorganic chemistry group, under Dr Alison Parkin, have been awarded funds for a specialised computer to allow successive generations of MChem project students to contribute to the development of methods to simulate enzyme redox reactions.  The group is developing a toolkit of electrochemical methodologies to deconvolute how biological electron transfer is controlled and the impact of the tuning of this redox activity on important bio-fuel reactions, e.g., H2-production and lignin degradation. Through a collaboration with Oxford,  they have integrated Bayesian statistical analysis into their experimental modelling.   Previously, experimental measurements were made in York and then data modelled in Oxford.  This limited the use of modelling for rapid optimisation of experiments and also the extent to which York students were able to build experience and expertise in improving the models. 

The Fund is managed by the York Structural Biology Laboratory (YSBL), the epicentre of York’s biological chemistry research, under Professor Rod Hubbard.  Work here focuses on the fundamental chemical bases for biological and biochemical processes, the use of small molecules to probe cellular biology, software and methods development and on the exploitation of enzymes in biocatalysis.

Professor Rod Hubbard, said: “The Hartshorn Jones Fund enables early-stage researchers at York to explore new methods at the interface between chemistry and biology to find out what they are good at and where they can make distinctive contributions to the development of new areas of science. The pioneering work in this area when Mike was a Chemistry undergraduate at York during the late 1980s attracted flexible funding (and equipment) from pharmaceutical, biotechnology and computer equipment companies. Such funding was transformative for Mike and laid the foundation for his successful career in developing scientific informatics systems that are now in use worldwide. We are delighted to continue working with Mike and the brightest minds at York, to ensure their groundbreaking research can be facilitated through this innovative fund.”

To apply for funding

Funding awards are between £500 - £2,000, with funding limited to PhD students or Post-Doctoral fellows within 5 years of PhD at the University of York, but open to students in Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Engineering and Technology, Maths, Computer Science or other relevant theme or subject area. 

For more information on the fund please contact hartshorn-jones-fund@york.ac.uk