Dan Bracewell Promoted to Professor of Bioprocess Analysis

We are pleased to be able to share the news that UCL Biochemical Engineering's Daniel Bracwell has been promoted to the position of Professor. We warmly congratulate Dan on his achievement and wish him the very best of luck! 

Daniel's research is in the area of bioprocess analysis. The area is fundamentally linked to the speed and capabilities of the analytical techniques used. The rise of "omics" (genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics) has lead to significant efforts in the area of analytical instrumentation to match these needs. This offers exciting possibilities to those engaged in the analysis of processes involving biological molecules at every scale. Daniel carried out pioneering studies into the use of biosensors to monitor and control the production of biopharmaceuticals. Bioprocess analysis does not only concern itself with instrumentation, it is also related to how experimentation is conducted and how the data is used. The desired outcome is methods that have applications as tools for future bioprocess development and control. To this end Daniel manages research activity as one of 5 principal investigators within the IMRC in Bioprocessing supported by leading national and multi-national companies. As part of this he supervises projects in collaboration Medimmune studying antibody degradation at solid liquid interfaces in the presence of shear and with Pfizer that proposes the hypothesis that mass spectrometry based methods may be used to understand product and contaminant physicochemical properties providing a logical framework for the design.

He also supervises work with Merck on automated micro-chromatography which will be applicable to process development. Daniel is also involved in several interdisciplinary / cross institution projects. He is joint supervisor of studies with the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) to investigate microfluidic methods to measure protein stability. This led to a successful grant bid with Dr Paul Dalby to the BBSRC funded Bioprocessing Research Industry Club (BRIC) titled "A new microfluidic tool for rapid analysis of protein stability and integrity in bioprocesses" in which Daniel is co-investigator. Further work in the area of microfluidics has been initiated with Prof. Steve Haswell at Hull University and Prof. Gary Lye. This examines the fundamental limits of scale-down of packed bed chromatographic systems in the bioprocess sector which will have implications for bioprocess development and control. Funding for the above research has come from the UK EPSRC and BBSRC and a range of company collaborators.

His current teaching activities span undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes offered by the Department. He leads the course; Introduction to Biochemical Engineering, and teaches on Downstream Processing and Mass Transfer courses. He is also module leader of the post-experience MBI® training modules in Chromatography, Analytical Data Analysis for the Bioprocess Industry, Bioprocess Design & Economic Evaluation and Bioprocess Facility Design.

Dan has also recently taken on the role of postgraduate-research tutor for the department.