The First International Collaborative and Cooperative Chemistry Symposium

James De Voss received a B.Sc. (Hons) in Chemistry from the University of Queensland in 1984. He was a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 scholar at Cambridge University, where he worked on the biosynthesis of vitamin B₁₂ and obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Sir Alan Battersby. A postdoctoral fellowship, again from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, allowed him to work with Prof. Craig Townsend at Johns Hopkins University on the mechanism of DNA cleavage caused by the enediyne antibiotic calicheamicin. He was then introduced to the cytochromes P450 by Prof. Paul Ortiz de Montellano with whom he worked while at the University of California, San Francisco. Since returning to the University of Queensland to take up an academic appointment, initially as a Senior lecturer (1995) and subsequently as a Reader (2004) and then a Professor (2008), he has continued his interest in problems at the interface of chemistry and biology, applying chemical principles and techniques to biological problems. He currently works with a range of bacterial, insect and mammalian P450s, as well as on the biogenesis of insect pheromones and the phytochemistry of herbal medicines.