• Group Lead, Gibson Group, Department of Chemistry, University of Manchester, 2023-present
  • Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick, 2022-2023
  • Research Fellow, Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick, 2015-2022
  • Early Career Fellowship, Institute of Advance Study, University of Warwick, 2015
  • PhD University of Warwick, 2011-2015 “Glycosylated nanomaterials” Neutralisation of bacteria and toxins” PI Prof. Matthew Gibson (Department of Chemistry & Medical School, UoW), Co-I Prof. Gurdyal Besra (School of Bioscience, University of Birmingham)
  • MSc Mathematical Biology and Biophysical Chemistry, University of Warwick, 2010-2011
  • MChem Chemistry, University of Sheffield 2006-2010

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3888-9290

Research Interests

Sarah-Jane’s research interests lie at the interface between materials chemistry and life sciences. The focus of her PhD research was on the design, synthesis and application of multivalent macromolecular vectors that can interact with microbial membranes. In particular, the use of glycopolymers synthesised by tandem post-polymerisation modification to selectively inhibit bacterial toxins (Angew. Chem. 2012, Polym. Chem. 2013 and Chem. Sci. 2014, JACS Au 2021) and glyco-gold nanoparticles with optimised polymer coatings to discriminate between lectins and bacterial phenotypes (J. Mater. Chem. B. 2014, ACS Macro Lett. 2014 and J. Mater Chem. B. 2016).

In May 2015, Sarah-Jane was awarded a highly competitive Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) Early Career Fellowship to continue to pursue research in the field of label-free diagnostics. In November 2015, Sarah-Jane started a as a research fellow to work on multivalent glyco-nanomaterials as point-of-care diagnostics (Analyst 2016 and Nanoscale. Horiz. 2017) and antimicrobial polymers (Biomac. 2017 and Chem. Eur. J. 2018) and particles (Biomac. 2018).

Sarah-Jane was part of the BBSRC and Innovate UK funded Specialty Glycans consortium which brought together eight UK universities (Southampton, Bristol, Leeds, York, Reading, Manchester, Imperial and Warwick) and five Industrial partners (Ludger, GSK, Carbosynth/Biosynth, Prozomix and Dextra) to chemoenzymatically synthesise fluorinated glycans and determine their binding towards an number of protein targets. Here we showed the differential binding of Lacto-N-biose derivatives towards Galectin-3 and Galectin-7 (Chem. Sci. 2021) and that fluorinated Lewis X derivatives could differentially bind to cholera toxin (Nat. Comm. 2024).

During the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, the Gibson group set out to develop a rapid diagnostic test with Iceni Diagnostics (Cent. Sci. 2020, ACS Sensors 2021).

Citation statistics and google scholar list here