Team

Sheena Radford is the Astbury Professor of Biophysics at the University of Leeds and a Royal Society Research Professor. Following her position as a research fellow with the late Professor Sir Chris Dobson at the University of Oxford, she joined the academic staff of the University of Leeds in 1995. She was Deputy Director of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds in 2009 – 2011 and its Director in 2012 – 2021. She currently holds a Royal Society Research Professorship at the University of Leeds.

Her work focuses on the question of how proteins fold, and how and why proteins aggregate and form amyloid fibrils linked to human disease. Her group also studies how bacteria fold proteins into their outer membranes to build the cell wall. These research areas have implications for the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease and the development of antibiotics targeted against Gram-negative pathogens.

In 2020 Sheena was elected Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to molecular biology. Sheena graduated in Biochemistry at the University of Birmingham in the UK and completed her PhD with the late Professor Richard Perham in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, UK.