Rob studied at the University of York, starting with an undergraduate in Mathematics followed by an MRes in Mathematics in the Living Environment, and finally a PhD in Chemistry at the York Structural Biology Laboratory (YSBL) where he focussed on the comparative analysis of macromolecules in the field of Structural Bioinformatics. In 2011 he joined the Computational Structural Biology group lead by Garib Murshudov at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB) in Cambridge, working on methods and software development for applications in Computational Crystallography and later also Electron cryo-Microscopy.
He has contributed to various developments and software packages distributed as part of the CCP4 and CCP-EM suites, including: ProSMART, REFMAC5, LORESTR, AceDRG, the CCP4 Monomer Library, and the graphical interfaces CCP4i, CCP4i2 and CCP4 Cloud. He regularly participates in international workshops, delivering training on macromolecular model building, refinement, validation, analysis and ligand modelling. He also teaches Applied Statistics as part of the Research Informatics Training initiative at the University of Cambridge.
In 2024 he assumed his current role as a Principal Computation Scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Scientific Computing Department at the Rutherford Appleton national Laboratory (STFC-SCD-RAL), working closely alongside the CCP4 and CCP-EM core teams. His research interests revolve around the use of statistical inference, modelling and data analysis to address outstanding problems in computational structural biology, with a view to facilitating improved quality and efficiency of data utilisation. In his spare time he enjoys music and cooking, and is kept busy by his two kids and their pet lizard.
