Leighton Pritchard

Chancellor’s Fellow (PI)

Born in Salford, raised in Wigan, educated in Bolton, Leighton started out as a Chemist, earning a degree (BSc (Hons)) in Forensic and Analytical Chemistry from the University of Strathclyde, before realising that wasn’t his calling and turning into a computational biologist for his final year project and PhD under the supervision of Mark Dufton, again at Strathclyde, investigating the evolution of snake venome toxins.

After this, Leighton was a PDRA on two Systems Biology projects in Prof. Doug Kell’s group in the Institute for Biological Sciences - as it was - at Aberystwyh (ac mae e’n caru’r iaith Gymraeg, hyd yn oed yn awr). He spent four years modelling yeast metabolism and rationally engineering proteins, before returning to Scotland to join the James Hutton Institute (until 2011 the Scottish Crop Research Institute) as a computational biologist. There he started working in host-pathogen interactions, microbial genomics, and diagnostics. In the meantime, he earned an Open University degree (BA (Hons)) in Mathematics.

Leighton joined Strathclyde as a Chancellor’s Fellow in 2019, just about having enough time to move his textbooks into the office, before the COVID pandemic hit.

Other jobs have included: lots of heaving and hauling, largely in warehouses; product development chemist in the oil industry (where he learned just enough plumbing to get by); and body fluid analysis in a clinical biochemistry lab.

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