Dr Julian Willis

Julian is a graduate of Cambridge University where he completed his undergraduate in Natural Sciences and Chemistry. He joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2014 for his PhD, working under Prof Jason Chin in the area of genetic code expansion to develop tools for the incorporation of unnatural amino acids into proteins using the cellular translation machinery. In particular he engineered new mutually orthogonal pyrrolysine tRNA/aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, expanding the number of different unnatural amino acids that could be incorporated simultaneously into proteins inside cells.

For his postdoctoral work, in 2018 Julian joined Prof David Liu at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with a Human Frontier Science Program Long-term Postdoctoral Fellowship. His research centred on the field of gene editing, creating new CRISPR-free cytosine base editors for the precise correction of genetic mutations in mitochondrial DNA which give rise to mitochondrial genetic disease. This work involved extensive protein engineering of zinc fingers and a double-stranded DNA deaminase, alongside work demonstrating the potential therapeutic applications of this new technology.

Julian established his own research lab in the Department of Chemistry in 2023, where he aims to explore and exploit the natural diversity of proteins in viruses and bacteria to engineer novel tools for biotechnology, particularly for gene editing applications.