Professor Marcel Jaspars
- Born
- Unknown
Marcel Jaspars is an academic currently at the University of Aberdeen, who explores the biological role of natural products found in sea organisms as they could be useful for new antibiotics and other drugs.
His research focuses on natural products. His team tries to isolate molecules and look at their structure, as well as try and figure out how they could be used in biomedical research. As well as looking at natural products, Marcel also takes examples from nature and modifies them to carry out new functions, which could offer interesting solutions to medical problems.
Marcel began his academic life at the University of Cambridge where he studied for a Chemistry BA degree. Upon graduating, he hopped over to Dublin, Ireland in 1987 where he began a PhD titled ‘Electrophilic Catalysis of the Sakurai Reaction’.
From there, he once again moved but this time across the pond to the USA to work in a laboratory at Texas A & M University. After one year, he moved again to work in a different lab at the University of California where he stayed for two years before returning to the UK and settling in Aberdeen.
He joined the faculty of science in Aberdeen in 1995 as a lecturer and was later promoted to full professorship in 2003. That same year he was awarded the Matt Suffness award by the American Society of Pharmacognosy which recognises the contributions of younger natural product scientists.
In 2007, he was appointed Chair of the editorial board of ‘Natural Product Reports’, a journal from the Royal Society of Chemistry. He remained Chair until 2010.
In recent years, he established the £1.6M Marine Biodiscovery Centre, a first-of-its-kind centre in the UK which brings together scientists from different disciplines to focus on marine resources for novel pharmaceuticals.
Marcel also leads PharmaSea, a European Union consortium who are exploring the deepest parts of the ocean for new drugs, as they believe that evolution could have progressed differently down there, and therefore new and exciting products could be found.
In addition to all of this, Marcel also makes time to teach both undergraduate and postgraduate Organic Chemistry at the University of Aberdeen. He also collaborated on a book ‘Organic Structure Analysis’ in 2010, and he is Member of several subcommittees and advisory boards, such as the Scientific Advisory Board of MabCent in Norway and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry on Biotechnology.