Matthew Todd is Professor and Chair of Drug Discovery at University College London (UCL), where he also leads the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and serves as Director of Global Engagement. His research focuses on open-science approaches to drug discovery, with a particular emphasis on open-source models to accelerate the development of new medicines.
Matthew is a leading advocate for open science in biomedical research. He founded and leads several open, collaborative drug discovery initiatives, including Open Source Malaria (OSM) and Open Source Antibiotics. He also co-led the medicinal chemistry core of the READDI-AViDD antiviral discovery project, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. His contributions have been recognised internationally. In 2011, he received the New South Wales Scientist of the Year Award in the Emerging Research category, and in 2012, the OSM consortium received an Accelerating Science Award from the Wellcome Trust, Google and PLOS. He was also named in the Medicine Maker Power List in 2017 and 2018.
Matthew completed an MA in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1995, followed by a PhD in organic chemistry in 1999 under the supervision of Chris Abell. He then undertook a Wellcome Trust–funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. He subsequently held positions at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London, before spending 13 years at the University of Sydney, where he progressed from Lecturer to Associate Professor prior to joining UCL in 2018. He has held visiting positions at Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the Broad Institute and Pembroke College, Oxford.