Dr. May Elizabeth Sharpe

Biography

May Sharpe (neé Marsh) received her bachelor degree with First Class Honours in Biochemistry from the University of Sussex in 2004. In 2008 she completed her PhD at the University of Bristol in Structural Biology under the supervision of Dr. Andrea Hadfield. During her PhD she spent one year working at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel. In 2008 she moved to the University of Cambridge to join Professor Sir Tom Bundell's and Marko Hyvonen’s groups working as part of an inter-departmental Wellcome Trust seeded drug discovery initiative to develop protein-protein interaction inhibitors using fragment-based approaches. In 2012 she joined the Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) group as a post-doc working on the optical upgrade of the X06SA beam line. In 2013 she became the Crystallisation Facility Scientist responsible for setting up and running the PSI Crystallisation Facility, a joint facility of the PSD and BIO departments. Since 2018 she has been the Group Leader of the MX Samples group.

Responsibilities and Research

May leads the MX samples group, a subsection of the MX group responsible for protein crystal growth and sample delivery in support of macromolecular crystallography research at the SLS and SwissFEL. She also runs the PSI crystallisation facility, training users and overseeing the maintenance of crystallisation robotics and imagers. Finally, she shares responsibility for the Fast Fragment and Compound Screening (FFCS) pipeline together with Justyna Wojdyla. May’s scientific interests include protein crystallisation method development, particularly the use of seeding; fragment screening using X-ray crystallography, and the development of new methods for delivering crystallographic samples to the beam at synchrotron and XFEL beamlines.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3880-7438