Dr Conrad Bessant
Reader in Chemometrics & Bioinformatics
Location: Cranfield Health, Building 63, Cranfield Campus
E: c.bessant@cranfield.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1234 758300
Current activities
Dr Conrad Bessant is the founder and leader of Cranfield's bioinformatics group, pursuing research interests in protein and peptide identification, biomarker discovery and systems biology. He designed and launched Cranfield's popular MSc in Applied Bioinformatics and continues to be involved in that course, as well as in other courses at Cranfield and elsewhere in Europe.
External Appointments
- Visiting Associate Professor, Kitakyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
- External Examiner, MSc Bioinformatics, Cardiff University
- External Examiner, MSc Applied Bioinformatics, University of Hertfordshire
Background
Conrad was awarded a degree in Physics by Nottingham University in 1994 and went on to complete a PhD in Chemometrics in 1998. In 1999 he was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s emerging chemometrician award and was appointed as a lecturer at Cranfield the following year, heading up a new bioinformatics group.
Conrad is a member of the International Society for Computational Biology, the Institute of Physics, the British Computer Society, the British Society for Proteome Research and the Society of Authors. He is a co-opted member of the RSC's chemometrics committee.
Selected publications
New book: Building Bioinformatics Solutions with Perl, R and MySQL, C. Bessant, I. Shadforth, D. Oakley, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Protein-Folding Location Can Regulate Manganese Binding Versus Copper- or Zinc-Binding, S. Tottey, K.J. Waldron, S.J. Firbank, B. Reale, C. Bessant, K. Sato, T.R. Cheek, J. Gray, M.J. Banfield, C. Dennison and N.J. Robinson, Nature, 2008, 455, 1138-1142.
GAPP: A Fully Automated Software for the Confident Identification of Human Peptides from Tandem Mass Spectra, I. Shadforth, W. Xu, D. Crowther, C. Bessant, Journal of Proteome Research, 2006, 5(10), 2849-2852.
Detection of M. Tuberculosis Infections in Culture and Sputum Using Electronic Nose Technology: Prospects for Clinical Application, R. Fend, A. Kolk, C. Bessant, P. Buijtels, P. Klatser, A.C. Woodman J. Clinical Microbiology, 2006, 44, 2039-2045.
Mapping the Arabidopsis Organelle Proteome, T. P. J. Dunkley, S. Hester, I. P. Shadforth, J. Runions, T. Weimar, S.L. Hanton, J. L. Griffin, C. Bessant, F. Brandizzi, C. Hawes, R. B. Watson, P. Dupree, K. S. Lilley. PNAS, 2006, 103, 6518-6523.
Simultaneous Quantification of Analytes in Quaternary Mixtures Using Dual Pulse Staircase Voltammetry and Genetically Optimised Neural Networks. E. Richards, C. Bessant and S. Saini, Analyst, 129 (4), 2004, 355-358.
