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Morgan Alexander

Professor of Biomedical Surfaces, Faculty of Science

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Research Summary

Publications: http://tinyurl.com/UpToMinutePapers

NEWS: Morgan is the recipient of the 2021 and 2022 Clarivate Highly cited Award in Pharmacology and Toxicology link and the 2023 award in the Cross-Field category link

Morgan Alexander is Professor of Biomedical Surfaces at the School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham. He is director of the EPSRC Large Grant: Designing bio-instructive materials for translation ready medical devices and the 3D OrbiSIMS facility. He received his Bachelor of Science in Materials in 1988 and his PhD from the same department at The University of Sheffield in 1992.

His group develops materials for application in biological environments, characterising relationships between the surface and biological response. Understanding these relationships is critical in the development of the biomaterials of the future and is the theme running through his group's work across a variety of biomedical application areas spanning bacterial adhesion to controlling stem cell response. Much progress has been made in discovering new biomaterials using a high throughput materials screening approach.

He has contributed to books on surface chemical modification and analysis and has authored over 200 papers dealing with surfaces in high quality peer reviewed publications, including research articles in Nature Biotechnology, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, PNAS and Biomaterials. This research is highly interdisciplinary, involving collaborators from a wide variety of fields including regenerative medicine, neuroscience, developmental biology, pharmaceutics, materials processing, plasma physics and nanofabrication, in the UK and with leading groups around the world, eg MIT and La Trobe. This work is funded by The Wellcome Trust, EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC and industry. A number of his group have gone on to take up independent research posts.

See the following videos:

  • Two super public engagement films associated with the 2019 and 2020 Royal Society Summer Exhibition Super Biomaterials to Fight Superbugs about bacterial infections and how materials can help here
  • Polymer coating repels bacteria which cause hospital infections here

Recently completed grants:

Biography:

  • 2010 - present Professor of Biomedical Surfaces, The University of Nottingham.
  • 2010 - 2014 Head of The Laboratory of Biophysics and Surface Analysis.
  • 2004 - 2010 Associate Professor and Reader of Biomedical Surface Analysis.
  • 1998 - 2003 EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer, UMIST.
  • 1996 - 1998 EU Marie Curie Fellow, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France.
  • 1993 -1996 Post Doctoral Researcher, Department of Engineering Materials, University of Sheffield.
  • 1992 - 1993 Surface Analyst, CSMA Ltd, Manchester.
  • 1988 - 1992 PhD, The University of Sheffield.
  • 1985 - 1988 B.Sc. Tech., Materials Science, The University of Sheffield.

Honours and Distinctions

  • 2023 Clarivate Highly cited Award in the Cross-Field category link
  • 2021 and 2022 Clarivate Highly cited Award in Pharmacology and Toxicology link
  • Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Awardee 2014-2022
  • Elected to the 2013 class of AVS Fellows, Chair of the Biomaterial Interfaces Division.
  • Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award holder 2012-2017.
  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry 2008-.
  • Chair of EPSRC Materials Programme funding panel 2004.
  • EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow 1998-2003.
  • EPSRC Peer Review College member 1999 to date.

Publications and metrics: http://tinyurl.com/UpToMinutePapers

Selected Publications

World-class research at the University of Nottingham

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