I am a chemist whose research career has focussed on the development of new approaches for the discovery of small molecule probes of biological mechanisms. I graduated with a BA in Natural Sciences from Churchill College, University of Cambridge, UK in 1993 and completed my PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry at the University of Cambridge in 1996. After a postdoc at the University of Manchester with Professor E J Thomas, I began my independent research career in 1998 as a Lecturer in Organic Chemistry at the University of Leeds. I established a research group focusing on the synthesis of bioactive small molecules, and in 1999 was a founder member of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology. I became Professor of Chemical Biology in 2005 and have been highly active within the Astbury Centre, a buoyant interdisciplinary Centre that aims collectively to ‘Understand Life in Molecular Detail’ (www.astbury.leeds.ac.uk), serving as both Director (2009-11) and Deputy Director (2005-8 and 2018-). I have published about 150 peer reviewed articles in chemistry and chemical biology. My research focuses on (i) the development of methods for the efficient exploration of chemical space including, most recently, our activity-directed synthesis approach; and (ii) the application of chemical probes in mechanistic biology studies. I have trained >100 postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers, and, since 2005, have been Deputy/Co-Director of Leeds's Wellcome-funded interdisciplinary cohort-based PhD programme "Molecular basis of biomolecular mechanisms". I was awarded the RSC Meldola Award and Medal (2001), the Pfizer Academic Award (2002), an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship (2004-9), the AstraZeneca Research Award in Organic Chemistry (2005), the RSC Corday-Morgan Award and Medal (2007), an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship (2016-21) and the UCH-Ehrlich Award in Medicinal Chemistry (2018).