Dr Kalum Thurgood-Parkes

Kalum started his career in chemistry at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where he graduated in 2019 with an MChem degree in Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry with an external placement. During that time, he spent a year as a visiting student researcher in 2018 at Kyushu University, Japan, under Professor Ken Sakai, researching di-cupric systems for the reduction of CO2 into relevant chemical feedstocks, as well as a master’s research project under Dr Euan Kay at the university of St Andrews in 2019 working on multi-scale structural effects controlling hydrazone exchange in dynamic covalent nanoparticles. He then received his PhD in Electronic Engineering in 2024 from the University of York, where he worked under Professor Steven Johnson, pursuing the development of continuous microfluidic immobilised enzyme reactor (μ-IMER) systems and their applications in heterogeneous biocatalysis. During this time, he took a 6-month secondment during the COVID-19 pandemic, helping establish a LAMP testing facility for the NHS. Currently a Post-doc under Dr Adam Clayton and Prof Richard Bourne, Kalum’s work focuses on holistic self-optimisation of telescoped flow sequences to reduce the manufacturing cost of essential medicines focusing specifically on the HIV-1 drug, Lenacapavir and is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Kalum’s main areas of academic interest include developing complex self-optimising reactor setups and their required control systems leveraging statistical and machine learning methods.