Prof Nicholas Westwood

Prof Nicholas Westwood

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 3816
Email
njw3@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

Nick Westwood completed his undergraduate and PhD studies in Chemistry at Pembroke College, Oxford. He then spent 6 years in the USA, first as a NATO post-doctoral research fellow working for Prof. P.D. Magnus FRS in Austin, Texas and then as a post-doc and Instructor at what was the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology at Harvard working for Prof. Tim Mitchison FRS and Prof. Matthew Shair. He returned to the UK in 2001 as a Royal Society Research Fellow at St Andrews and is currently Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Teaching

In addition to running tutorials in organic chemistry (CH1601 and CH2601) and laboratory demonstrating and running retrosynthesis workshops (CH2601), Nick lectures and runs revision tutorials on three honours modules at present: Quantitative Aspects of Medicinal Chemistry (CH3716), Synthetic Methodology (CH3612 – module convenor) and Chemical Biology (CH5614 – module convenor). He also contributes to teaching through running tutorials in St Andrews’ Integrating Chemistry course (CH4461/5461), acting as an academic monitor on the external placement module (CH4441), supporting students doing our recently developed Year 4 course on Chemistry Research Skills (CH4442) in particular helping them to prepare a literature review and hosting Year 5 project students. He runs all aspects of recruitment to the post-graduate taught (PGT) courses and often contributes to these programmes and related modules run in the English Language Teaching (ELT) School to support our overseas students.

Research areas

The main expertise in our group is in organic synthetic chemistry with a continuing interest in natural product synthesis. Recently we have expanded our expertise to include the use of renewable resources including the biopolymer lignin. We also maintain a strong interest in research at the chemistry/biology interface.

PhD supervision

  • Gerard Su
  • Filomena Tedesco
  • Stephen Bishop

Selected publications

 

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