CCDC's PhD Partners
We sponsor PhD students and co-supervise them along with leading scientists from academic and commercial institutions around the world. Here we share some of the PhD partners we are currently working with.
PhD Supervisors
Lee Brammer, University of Sheffield
Lee Brammer is Professor of Solid-State & Inorganic Chemistry at University of Sheffield. He was Assistant/Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University of Missouri-St. Louis prior to returning to the UK in 2001. Although not CCDC sponsored as a student himself, he did work with the CCDC during his PhD on the bond lengths & angle tabulations that were the forerunners to MOGUL, and has since worked with the CCDC through studentships related to dynamics & reactions in crystals, MOFs and intermolecular interactions.
Elena Simone, Politecnico di Torino
Prof. Elena Simone obtained her BSc and MSc in chemical engineering from the University of Pisa (Italy). After a short period as research assistant in Unilever R&D (Colworth, UK), in 2012 she started her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Loughborough University (UK). She graduated in 2015, and after a short postdoc between Loughborough and Purdue University (US), in 2016 she joined the school of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Leeds (UK), as lecturer in Food Crystal Engineering. Since 2021 she has been leading the Crystallization & Crystal Engineering group at Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and teaching chemical plants as associate (2021-2024) and then full professor (since 2024). Her research interests are process analytical technologies, food crystallization process & product design, particle technology for formulation of multiphase food and pharmaceutical products.
Fergus Imrie, University of Oxford
Fergus is a Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Fellow at the University of Oxford in the Department of Statistics. Prior to this, Fergus was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2021-2024. Fergus was awarded his DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford in the Department of Statistics in 2021, where his thesis explored deep learning approaches for pre-clinical drug discovery, with an emphasis on generative molecular design. His current research is focused on developing machine learning methods and techniques for medicine and drug discovery. He is particularly interested in approaches for designing potent, selective small molecules using structure-based techniques, experimental design and decision-making in drug discovery, and how to learn efficiently from small quantities of often noisy data.
Cameron Brown, University of Strathclyde
Cameron Brown is a Reader in Digital Pharmaceutical Manufacturing at the University of Strathclyde and the CMAC research centre. He is a Chemical Engineering graduate of Heriot-Watt University, where he also obtained his PhD in the characterisation of crystallisation processes. His current research is focused on the development and application of modelling approaches for pharmaceutical manufacturing, including GenAI, self-driving labs, and hybrid physics/data approaches.
Simon Coles, University of Southampton
Simon Coles (http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8414-9272) obtained his BSc and PhD in structural systematics and molecular modelling at the University of Wales, Cardiff before a PDRA appointment with the Royal Institution to build the world’s first dedicated small molecule single crystal beamline, 9.8, at the Daresbury synchrotron. In 1998 Simon moved to Southampton to establish a new laboratory and manage the National Crystallography Service. Simon became Director of the National Crystallography Service in 2009, Director of the UK Physical Sciences Data-science Service in 2019 and recently a lead for the Physical Science Data Infrastructure and the National Electron Diffraction Facility. Simon is an author of over 1000 papers supporting chemical synthesis, in many areas of structural chemistry and in digital/chemical information. He is one of the world’s most prolific chemical crystallographers, ranking in the top 25 all-time contributors to the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).
Andreas Bender, University of Cambridge
Andreas Bender is a Director for Digitial Life Sciences at Nuvisan in Berlin, as well as a Reader for Molecular Informatics with the Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge/MA as well as at Leiden University in the Netherlands as well as AstraZeneca before his current post.
Vitaliy Kurlin, University of Liverpool
Vitaliy Kurlin is a mathematician by training and has completed his PhD in Geometry and Topology at Moscow State University in 2003. Since 2016 he is working as a Data Scientist in the Materials Innovation Factory and as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Peyman Z. Moghadam, University of Sheffield
Peyman Moghadam joined the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Sheffield in November 2018. Prior to joining Sheffield, he was the Head of the computational group at the Adsorption and Advanced Materials Lab at the University of Cambridge for three years. From 2013-2015, Peyman did a postdoc with Professor Randall Snurr at Northwestern University after completing his PhD at the University of Edinburgh.
Aurora Cruz-Cabeza, University of Manchester
Aurora Cruz-Cabeza is a Lecturer at the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Sciences, the University of Manchester. During her Masters Degree, she spent some months at the Royal Institution in London and then she moved to Cambridge where she gained a PhD in Physical Chemistry. Following her PhD, she worked as a researcher in several pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer and Roche), the University of Amsterdam and the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.
Iain Oswald, University of Strathclyde
Iain D.H. Oswald graduated from the University of Edinburgh and remained there in the group of Professor Simon Parsons to study hydrogen-bonding patterns and co-crystallisation as part of his PhD. In 2009, Iain started his post at SIPBS as a Lecturer in Pharmaceutics and is interested and has been awarded funding in the areas of co-crystallisation of pharmaceutical materials at high pressure and polymorphism and polymerisation of monomeric materials. Iain has been an integral part of the redevelopment of the MPharm curriculum.
