Professor Jeremy Nicholson

Academic Career: Jeremy Nicholson obtained his PhD from St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, King’s College, London University in 1980 on the toxicology or zinc, cadmium and mercury in mammals and birds using atomic spectroscopy and electron probe X-ray microanalysis. In 1981 he joined the inorganic biochemistry research group of Professor Peter Sadler, FRS as a post-doctoral research fellow, working on the molecular toxicology and protein-binding of Cadmium using high resolution multinuclear NMR spectroscopy. He then held a series of academic appointments from 1982 to 1989, as Lecturer in Inorganic Biochemistry at Birkbeck College, London; as Lecturer in Molecular and Experimental Toxicology at The London School of Pharmacy, University College, London. He was made Reader in Biological Chemistry at Birkbeck College in 1989 and promoted to Full Professor of Biological Chemistry in 1992. He was appointed to the University of London Established Chair of Biological Chemistry and as Head of the Section of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College London in 1998. Subsequently he was made Head of the Department of Biomolecular Medicine in 1997, then Head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer in 2009. In 2012 he became the founding director of the world’s first National Phenome Centre – the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Center – and the Chairman of the International Phenome Centre Network in 2016. He left Imperial in late 2018 to become the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences at Murdoch University and to direct the new Australian National Phenome Center which officially opened in October, 2019.

Prizes, Awards and Honours: Nicholson has received several science prizes including: The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Silver Medal for Analytical Chemistry (1992); The RSC Gold Medal for Analytical Chemistry (1997); for the development of biological NMR spectroscopy tools for diagnostics; The UK Chromatographic Society Jubilee Silver Medal (1994) for the development of hyphenated liquid chromatography-NMR approaches in drug metabolism; The Pfizer Prize for Chemical and Medicinal Technologies (2002) for pharmaceutical applications of NMR spectroscopy; The RSC medal for Chemical Biology (2003) for Chemometrics approaches to NMR-based diagnostics; The RSC International Interdisciplinary Prize (2008) for contributions in chemical sciences to problems in biomedicine; The Pfizer Global Research Prize for Chemistry (2006) for contributions to understanding the molecular toxicology of drugs and the Semelweiss-Budapest International Prize for Biomedicine (2010) for his work on development of advanced NMR methods for studying disease and drug toxicity.

He was elected as a Fellow of The UK Royal Academy of Medical Sciences in 2010; as an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the International Metabolomics Society (2012); as an Honorary Lifetime Member of the US Society of Toxicology (2013); Honorary Albert Einstein Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Medical Biochemistry (2014), Elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (2018) for outstanding contributions to the advancement of medicine and medical sciences. He was made an Honorary Doctor of Science, Honoris Causa (Hong Kong Baptist University), in 2020.

Professor Nicholson holds multiple honorary and adjunct professorships including The University of New South Wales, The University of Western Australia, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Fudan University, where he is also co-chair of the International Human Phenome Project Steering Committee, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Wuhan (Institute of Atomic and Nuclear Physics, also an honorary director of the Key State laboratory of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) and The Chinese Academy of Sciences Dalian Institute of Physical Chemistry and Separation Sciences where he is also an honorary director of the Key State Laboratory of Metabonomics).