Martin Walsh

Martin Walsh is deputy director of life sciences at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s 3rd generation synchrotron source. He obtained his first degree in chemistry from University College Galway in 1989 and continued his research at Galway where he contributed to the establishment of an Irish based protein crystallography group and the determination of the first macromolecular structures in Ireland as part of his PhD. He has extensive synchrotron MX experience having worked at DESY Hamburg, the APS Argonne, ESRF and Diamond. He has accumulated over 30 year’s experience in macromolecular X-ray crystallography (MX) and has deposited >200 structures with the Protein Data Bank. He has been at the forefront of high throughput developments in crystallography which have facilitated the collection of the best data from the most challenging of samples. His current research interests are focused on respiratory pathogens and mechanisms used by bacteria to colonize and persist in the human host. Within the current COVID19 pandemic his group’s activities have been fully diverted to applying a structure-based drug discovery approach to the two cysteine proteases of SARS-CoV-2. His group and collaborators taken a completely open-access approach to this work and a full summary along with experimental data can be found at https://www.diamond.ac.uk/covid-19.html