The Magic of Crystallography : from Penicillin and Chocolate to Drug Discovery.
Welcome back Elspeth.
The St Mary's SCR and St Mary's Alumni Society (SMAS) are delighted to welcome alumna Prof. Elspeth Garman back to St Mary's on the evening of November 11th 2025 for their annual lecture - The Magic of Crystallography: from Penicillin and Chocolate to Drug Discovery.
Elspeth studied Physics at St Mary's from 1973-1976. She is now a retired professor of molecular biophysics at the University of Oxford and a former President of the British Crystallographic Association.
She taught at Lincoln College, St Hilda's College, St Anne's College, Somerville College, and Worcester College, and switched to biophysics in 1987. In a seminal paper in 2006, Garman and collaborators established the radiation dose limit for cryocooled protein crystals, which was named the "Garman limit" after her.
To read more about Elspeth, visit her Wikipedia page.
The Lecture
The annual lecture will be hosted at St Mary's College on November 11th from 8:30 to 9:30pm, and there will be an option to join us online.What has the art of the chocolatier got to do with drug discovery, proteins and DNA?The linking theme is crystals, which allow us to make delicious chocolate and determine the three-dimensional shapes of all sizes of molecules, ranging from the tiny chocolate moiety to the much larger proteins that allow our bodies to function, through to the DNA that carries our genetic information. X-ray crystallography was born in 1913, and it has flowered to elucidate many disciplines since then, with applications in engineering, physics, chemistry, earth sciences and biology. Using crystallography, we can unravel the shapes of biomolecules in our bodies that are targets for drugs against disease, and thus identify new treatments.
Register to come along
The lecture is available for St Mary's SCR, alumni, students and Durham University colleagues to come along either in person or join us online.
If you would like to come, please complete the registration form, and further details will follow.
As a St Mary’s alumna, I am delighted to be invited back to college to share some of the research from my working life as a crystallographer. I’m looking forward to meeting other alumni, as well as students and like-minded colleagues, and I hope to be able to hear some of their stories too.
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