Louise Serpell: Difference between revisions

British biochemist and structural biologist

Louise C. Serpell MAE is a British biochemist , structural biologist and neuroscientist. She is Professor of Biochemistry Emerita in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex and was Director of Sussex Neuroscience until May 2025.

Serpell was born in Brighton, East Sussex, England. From 1989 to 1992 she studied at the University of Nottingham, graduating with a single-honours degree in Biochemistry and Genetics. She then undertook doctoral research in the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford, completing her DPhil in 1996.^{[citation needed]}

From 1996 to 1997, Serpell was a postdoctoral research assistant at the Centre for Research into Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of Toronto with Dr P. E. Fraser. She subsequently worked as an independent research associate at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge from 1997 to 2000.^[1] Between 2000 and 2003 she held a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, before joining the University of Sussex in 2003 as a Wellcome Trust Fellow. She was appointed Reader in Biochemistry in 2006 and promoted to Professor of Biochemistry in 2010.^[2] In 2019, she became Director of Sussex Neuroscience, a research centre within the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex.^[3]

Serpell’s research focuses on the structural characteristics of amyloidogenic proteins and their role in the pathology of neurodegenerative and protein misfolding diseases.^[4] She has worked on the structural biology of fibrous molecules, including studies that reported the molecular structure of amyloid fibrils.^[5] Her research spans molecular biophysics, cell biology, neuroscience and high-resolution imaging.^[6]

Serpell is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Molecular Biology,^[7] Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, the Biochemical Journal,^[8] and Amyloid.^[9]