Dr Saidul Islam is a Lecturer in Chemistry at Kings College London Department of Chemistry. He received his MChem degree in Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry (1st class, with prizes) and a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Manchester (thesis title: ‘Studies towards the chemical origins of life’).

Saidul carried out postdoctoral studies at Queen Mary University of London in organometallic chemistry and catalysis. He then moved to University College London as a Research Fellow in prebiotic systems chemistry.

Saidul joined King’s College London in 2022 as part of the Department of Chemistry’s expansion programme. 

Saidul has made key discoveries towards understanding the formation of nucleic acids, peptides, and organic cofactors under potentially prebiotic conditions (‘before biology’).

Besides research, Saidul enjoys lecturing to the next generation of chemists. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research interests

• Prebiotic chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Chemical origin of life
• Predisposed chemistry
• Green chemistry
• Catalysis
• Systems chemistry

Teaching

• Organic Chemistry 2
• Advanced Topics in Synthesis and Reactivity
• UG Research Methods Literature Review
• MSci Research Project & Dissertation
• MRes Research Methods in Experimental & Computational Chemistry
• MRes Research Project in Interdisciplinary Chemistry 

Research profile

For more information on Dr Islam's research please see his Research Portal page

The Islam Group

Postgraduate Researchers

• Damon Hodder

The Islam Group wants to unravel the chemical pathways that gave rise to the emergence of life on early Earth.

Their research broadly falls under the term ‘prebiotic chemistry’–chemistry before biochemistry. One view is that the chemistry on early Earth had to be different to existing biochemistry because metabolic reactions are (by and large) difficult or non-selective without enzyme catalysis. Enzymes are, however, products of billions of years of evolution and were likely absent at the origin of life. In the face of such a dichotomy, we are forced to ask difficult questions about our very own existence, such as:

• What sort of chemistries preceded life in the absence of enzyme catalysis?
• How did these chemistries evade the shackles of disastrously complex mixtures and indiscriminate reactivity that typically occurs when highly energetic molecules are combined together?
• Are there remnants of these chemical pathways persisting (in some form) in present biochemistry?
• Is life the way it is because the core structures of biology (DNA, RNA, proteins, cofactors) were omnipresent from the very moment organic chemistry was able to take place on the early Earth?

The Islam Group use chemistry (including synthetic organic chemistry) and various analytical techniques (such as NMR spectroscopy) to answer these questions.