Philip Day

Overview

RSC Referee.

Referee to several other journals.

Visiting Professor UCI.

PGR Tutor and Biomed Sci Tutor 

Biography

Philip Day is Reader in Synthetic Biology and Quantitative Genomics at Manchester University, Director of the Quantitative Molecular Medicine Group and Principle Investigator at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, and a member of the Centre for Epidemiology and CIGMR, at the Medical Faculty. He currently is developing synthetic biology and chemical biology approaches to directed evolution of novel proteins and aptamers for biomedical applications. These are used in combination with expertise for building integrated pathogenesis models of CML. Other closely related studies concern the enhanced uptake of anti-cancer drugs through membrane associated transporters, and Philip maintains an academic interest in the biological significance of heterogeneity. 

During 1990 to 1995 he established The Molecular Oncology Prognostic and Research Laboratories at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital, and between 1995 and 1997 he worked on the Human Genome Mapping Project at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Complex Diseases, Oxford, developing high throughput mapping procedures and instrumentation. In 1997 he joined the Department of Biochemistry, Oxford (with Sir E.M. Southern), where he contributed to a very high throughput sequence analysis study. Dr Day has always maintained a deep interest with the production of new and innovative tools for applied quantitative molecular biology, and more recent research programmes have developed interests in miniaturisation for single cell studies. He has a firm belief that units of biologically meaningful data should be presented as molecules per cell. He is developing procedures to enable quantitative data measurements for the implementation of predictive systems biology modeling. This work has produced patent applications related to gene quantification. For over many years he has developed specialist knowledge in the paediatric cancers chronic myeloid leukaemia and neuroblastoma. He is active in several other applied research areas related to transcriptomics and aneuploidy, including interests in integrated miniaturisation for micro total analysis. He has over 110 peer-reviewed papers and presently supervises several PhD degree students. 

Between 1998 and 2002 he founded and headed the Functional Genomics Unit, Childrens’ University Hospital Zurich. In 2002 he moved to the Medical School, University of Manchester and became Director of Operations for CIGMR. He was invited in March 2006 to move his group to the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB), where he is Principal Investigator, and continues developing applied quantitative measurement in relation to disease progression by working closely with groups in systems biology, analytical instrumentation, miniaturisation and text mining. He was a member of the MIB Council, and established and directed the MRes in Translational Medicine degree programme. Philip serves as an examiner for UK grant bodies, a FP7 EU expert examiner, external examiner for biological sciences degree schemes, University of Cardiff, visiting professor at the Department of Bioengineering, UCI, CA, PGR Tutor, and is an editorial team member for the RSC journal Integrative Biology.

In 2004 and 2008 respectively, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Fellow of the Society of Biology.