Professor Jane Clarke

 University of Cambridge

 http://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/group/jclarke/

Jane is Professor of Molecular Biophysics in the Chemistry Department of the University of Cambridge and her scientific interests are in the field of protein folding. Jane’s research is multidisciplinary, combining single molecule and ensemble biophysical techniques with protein engineering and simulations to investigate protein folding. The Clarke group address many of the fundamental questions on how proteins fold and the evolution of folding landscapes by studying families of homologous proteins. They are interested in more complex problems, including investigating the folding and misfolding of multidomain proteins, and, recently, folding upon binding of intrinsically disordered proteins. 

Jane’s career is somewhat unusual. After several years teaching in high schools she started a PhD at the age of 40 with Professor Sir Alan Fersht in Cambridge. Jane then went on to do a post doc in NMR at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering and then re-joined the Chemistry department as a Welcome Trust research fellow in 1997.

Jane is still a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow today. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015. She has been a member of the Protein Society for many years and was a member of the Protein Society Executive Council from 2008 to 2011. She is particularly interested in encouraging young women to stay in science as so many talented women are lost at the stage where they move between post doc and faculty positions. Jane knows by experience that this is a career one can combine happily and successfully with being a mother (and grandmother too!)