Alex H. Y. Chan was born and raised in Hong Kong. He obtained his first class Master’s degree in Pharmacy from University of East Anglia in 2017. He conducted his undergraduate project under the supervision of Professor Ganesan and awarded the Andrew Thompson Prize for the best medicinal chemistry research project. After a year-long training at Lloyds Pharmacy and registering as a pharmacist in 2019, he secured a PhD position at University of Cambridge where he developed small-molecule ligands to study and inhibit thiamine pyrophosphate dependent enzymes under the supervision of Professor Finian Leeper. 

His thesis project was highly collaborative in nature and has led to around ten publications in multiple medicinal chemistry and bioorganic chemistry journals. In winter 2022, he briefly joined the group led by Professor Anna Hirsch at Saarland University (Germany) as a visiting scientist. Following graduation in summer 2023 and a short-term post-doctoral training at Cambridge, he began his post-doctoral research at University of Oxford. Here his work is focused on developing novel antibiotics to combat antimicrobial resistance under the supervision of Professor Chris Schofield FRS.

Alex is very passionate about the multi-disciplinary approach to drug discovery: while his expertise is on drug design and synthesis, he also investigates the ligand-protein interactions using biochemical, biophysical and computational techniques. Outside the lab, he enjoys reading, watching football, as well as spending time with his cats, birds, family and friends.