Dr Brian Lyons

Cancer biology and virotherapy delivery

Brian joins the Oxford Centre for Drug Delivery Devices (OxCD3) as part of a collaboration with the Seymour group in Oncology and is working to enhance the delivery of oncolytic adenovirus through conjugation of sonosensitive nanoparticles which facilitate initiation of acoustic cavitation whilst simultaneously shielding the virus from the immune system. Brian completed his BSc in Chemistry (Hons) at the National University of Ireland Galway and then relocated to Australia where he spent two years working as a Synthetic Chemist for a Sydney-based R+D pharmaceutical company investigating novel oncology drugs. He obtained his PhD from the University of Sydney under the supervision of Professor Roger Truscott where his research focused on the age-related changes that occur in long-lived human proteins and their implications for healthy ageing. He continued his research at Sydney University as a postdoctoral researcher where he investigated the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease and cataract. As a postdoctoral scholar within the Davis group at Oxford, Brian worked a variety of projects all of which were based on chemically modifying proteins, peptides and sugars to understand, exploit and modify biomolecular function.

Dr Luca Bau

Microbubble Mediated Drug Delivery combining Ultrasound and Magnetic Targeting

Luca received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2010, then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Arizona State University on the design and synthesis of metallopetides containing non-natural amino acids acting as enzyme micmics for DNA cleavage and water oxidation. Between 2010-2012, he worked as  a post-doctroral fellow at the Universiy of Padova, on the design of fluorescent probes for measuring chloride currents in neuronal cells. He joined the University of Oxford as a post-doctoral research assistant in 2012, working on developping quality control protocols for a commercial polysaccharide starting material.  He subsequently joined OxCD3 in 2016 to work on the synthesis of stimulus-responsive droplets for brain drug delivery applications. 

Dr Bernard Shieh

Targeted Drug Delivery to Brain Tumours

Bernard graduated in 2010 with a BS in Physics from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He received his MS in 2015 and his PhD in 2017 from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA), both in Mechanical Engineering. Working with Professor Levent Degertekin and Professor Karim Sabra, his graduate work focused on the modelling and application of Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer (MUT) arrays, with particular emphasis on their emerging use in medical diagnostics. In 2017, Bernard served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech, working on foldable array concepts for intracardiac echocardiography, and on the application of machine learning to ultrasonic myography for finger-tracking, gesture recognition, and prosthesis control. He joined OxCD3 in 2018 as a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Professor Eleanor Stride on array development for targeted drug delivery.