Leon Willis | Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Leeds

Dr Leon F Willis MRSC is postdoctoral research fellow at the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, University of Leeds. He is currently researcher co-investigator on an EPSRC-funded grant, supervised by Prof David Brockwell, Prof Sheena Radford OBE FRS FMedSci and Prof Nik Kapur, as well as working with AstraZeneca PLC and UCB Pharma. Prior to this, he was funded by an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship and multiple industrial collaborations. His research (from 2014 to present) focusses on fundamentally understanding how hydrodynamic forces promote the aggregation of therapeutic antibodies, then combining this knowledge with other biophysical assays to aid the manufacture of these molecules. He has also developed statistical workflows to rationalise antibody developability. He graduated with a PhD from the same laboratories in 2018 and graduated with an MChem in Biological Chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 2014.