Rob Neely graduated with a MChem from Edinburgh in 2001. He completed his PhD in Edinburgh in 2005, working in Anita Jones’s group on the application of time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy to study the DNA duplex. He was awarded an EPSRC post doctoral fellowship at the Life Sciences Interface (Edinburgh) and spent a year with Nobel Laureate, Sir Richard Roberts at New England Biolabs, MA as part of this work. Rob moved to Johan Hofkens’ group in Leuven, Belgium in 2009 to take up a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship and was subsequently awarded an ‘Innovatiemandaat’ by the Flemish Government in 2012 to pursue the development of a single-molecule DNA mapping platform. Rob took up his post in Birmingham in July 2014.

Charlotte Vranken, Jochem Deen, Lieve Dirix, Tim Stakenborg, Wim Dehaen, Volker Leen, Johan Hofkens and Robert K. Neely, (2014) “Super-resolution Optical DNA Mapping via DNA Methyltransferase-directed Click-chemistry” Nucleic Acids Resarch, 42 (7): e50 Douglas M Matje, Hongjun Zhou, Darren A. Smith, Robert K. Neely, David T.F. Dryden, Anita C Jones, Frederick Willis Dahlquist, and Norbert O. Reich (2013) “Enzyme Promoted Base Flipping Controls DNA Methylation Fidelity” Biochemistry, 52, 1677–1685 Peter Dedecker , Sam Duwé , Robert K. Neely , Jin Zhang (2012) “Localizer: fast, accurate, open-source, and modular software package for superresolution microscopy” Journal of Biomedical Optics, 17, 126008. Robert K. Neely, Jochem Deen and Johan Hofkens (2011) “Optical mapping of DNA: Single-molecule-based methods for mapping genomes” Biopolymers,95, 298-311 Robert K. Neely, Jun-ichi Hotta, Peter Dedecker, Giedre Urbanaviciute, Saulius Klimasauskas and Johan Hofkens (2010) “DNA fluorocode: A single molecule optical map of DNA with nanometer resolution” Chemical Science, 1, 453-460