Mat Todd was born in Manchester, England. He obtained his PhD in organic chemistry from Cambridge University in 1999. He was a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral scholar at The University of California, Berkeley, a college fellow at Cambridge University, a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. Between 2005 and 2018, Mat was at the School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney. He is now Chair of Drug Discovery at University College London (UCL).

Research Areas

Mat’s research interests include the development of new ways to make molecules then finding out what those molecules do and why. He has a significant interest in open science and how it may be used to accelerate research, with particular emphasis on open source discovery of new medicines. He founded and currently leads the Open Source Malaria (OSM), Mycetoma (MycetOS), Tuberculosis (OSTB) and Antibiotics (AntibiOS) consortia, and is a founder of a broader Open Source Pharma movement. He is on the editorial boards of PLoS One, ChemistryOpen, Nature Scientific Reports and SciPost Chemistry.

In 2011, he was awarded a New South Wales Scientist of the Year award in the Emerging Research category for his work in open science and, in 2012, the OSM consortium was awarded one of three Wellcome Trust/Google/PLoS Accelerating Science Awards. For his open source research, Mat was selected for the Medicine Maker’s Power List in 2017–2021.