Daren Fearon

Daren is the Senior Beamline Scientist responsible for managing the XChem academic user program and in-house research, including collaborations and partnerships such as EUbOpen and iNEXT-Discovery. He is also a co-investigator of the NIH funded AI-driven Structure-enabled Antiviral Platform (ASAP) AViDD Centre and a founding member of the COVID Moonshot consortium. 

He joined the XChem team in February 2020 following 6 years in the Structural Biology group at the drug discovery company Evotec in Abingdon where he was a frequent user of the XChem platform. 

He obtained a MSci in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Glasgow (including 1 year in the Material Sciences department at Pfizer, Sandwich) before completing a PhD in structure-based design of protein kinase inhibitors with Professors Keith Jones and Richard Bayliss at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. 

Following his PhD studies, he spent 2 years as a PDRA in the Chemical Biology, Diagnostics and Therapeutics group at the University of Southampton working on the identification and validation of novel anti-bacterial drug targets.