Dr. Andrew Westwell
Dr. Andrew Westwell has been a Senior Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry at Cardiff University since 2006. He graduated with a degree in Chemistry from the University of Leeds in 1990, and then completed a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the same department under the supervision of Prof. Chris Rayner. Following a two-year postdoctoral position in the Department of Chemistry at Loughborough University under the supervision of Profs. Jonathan Williams then Prof. Chris Moody, he was appointed as a Research Fellow within the Cancer Research Laboratories headed by Prof. Malcolm Stevens at the University of Nottingham. He was appointed to a Cancer Research UK funded Lectureship in 2001 in the School of Pharmacy at Nottingham, and moved to the Welsh School of Pharmacy in 2006 to take up his present post.
His research interests centre on cancer drug discovery (design and synthesis of new drug candidates) and the development of fluorinated biomarkers for Positron Emission Tomography. Current cancer drug targets of interest include E3 ubiquitin ligases (e.g. breast cancer associated protein 2, BCA2) and apoptotic pathway proteins (e.g. Bcl-2).