Dr Alex Brogan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, King's College London. Alex obtained both his MSci (2008) and PhD (2012) from the School of Chemistry, University of Bristol. After a short postdoc there, he moved to the Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, where he was a Research Associate until 2019. During this time, he was also a Visiting Researcher, at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017 – 2018). In 2019, Alex moved to the Department of Chemistry, King’s College London, to establish his group as a Lecturer in Chemistry. His research is broadly on the development of protein-based biomaterials with high stabilities against temperature, aggregation, and non-aqueous environments. Particularly, his research focusses on combining these biomaterials with ionic liquids to provide new opportunities for sustainable biocatalysis and soft-material design.

Research Interests

• Biocatalysis in ionic liquids
• Non-aqueous enzymes
• Protein stabilisation
• Biophysics of proteins in unnatural environments
• Functional hybrid materials
• Ionogels
• Protein-based biomaterials
• Deep eutectic solvents for bio-applications

Teaching

• Physical Chemistry 2
• Advanced Chemistry for Life Sciences
• UG Research Methods Literature Review
• MSci Research Project & Dissertation
• MRes Research Project in Interdisciplinary Chemistry
• MRes Research Methods in Experimental & Computational Chemistry

Research profile

For more information on Dr Brogan's research please his Research Portal page.

The Brogan Group

Research Associates

• Jake Nicholson

Postgraduate Researchers

• Susana Meza Huaman          
• Annika Samuel
• Claudia Almuzara Romero
• Desmond Koomson

The Brogan Group seeks to push the boundaries of biological systems so they can tolerate harsh and unnatural environments. Sitting at the interface between science and engineering, our primary aim is to develop new biotechnologies that will help us move to a more sustainable, renewable, economy.

Our society has an increasing demand for the fuels, plastics, and other essential chemicals that support our modern way of life. This growing energy requirement is in direct competition with the need to better protect our environment to mitigate the ongoing climate change we are experiencing. Furthermore, our relative inability to efficiently recycle current generation plastics has lead to an accumulation of waste that is an ongoing ecological disaster. We therefore need to start improving the efficiency of how we make the products we need, and how to recycle those we no longer need. Many of the processes involved in making our fuels and chemicals can be environmentally damaging. Similarly, many current recycling strategies are equally as energy intensive. As a result, we need to develop more environment-friendly and energy efficient processes.

Research in the Brogan Group aims to develop new enzyme-based biotechnologies to help us move to a more sustainable, renewable, economy. The major project in the group is the development of solvent-free liquid proteins as a novel biomaterial for the deployment of enzymes in industrially relevant solvent systems. The secondary project in the group is the design and synthesis of ionic liquid infiltrated polymer networks, “ionogels”, as versatile soft materials for biocatalysis and drug delivery.

Visit the Brogan Group website to find out more.