Mark (he/him) is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Bristol.
Following degrees in Biochemistry from Liverpool and Southampton Universities, Mark has spent nearly 30 years at Bristol University, and started his lab in 1998, funded by a Wellcome Trust Fellowship. The research focus of his group is the mechanistic analysis of DNA recognition and cleavage by prokaryotic defence systems such as Restriction-Modification and CRISPR. They use a dual experimental approach to studying DNA-protein interactions – combining single molecule microscopy (including magnetic tweezers, TIRF and optical tweezers) with ensemble biochemistry (including millisecond time-resolution rapid-mixing fluorescence spectroscopy, molecular biology and protein chemistry). More recently they have started using nanopore sequencing as a tool for mapping DNA cleavage and modification by defence systems.