Clare Towse, a senior fellow in Valerie Daggett’s lab has received the 2015 UW Postdoc Mentor of the Year Award. This award recognizes and honors the tremendous role postdocs play in student research and training at UW, and their dedication to guiding and inspiring students to become their best selves.

Nominations for this award are accepted from all departments on campus. Awardees receive a $2,000 discretionary fund honorarium and are recognized at a year-end reception hosted by the Graduate School.

After graduating from the University of Leicester in the UK with an MChem degree, Clare-Louise Towse began her career as an analytical chemist focusing on NMR spectroscopy method development. Clare’s first notable achievement was made while working towards an MPhil degree at the University of Manchester where she pioneered a variable temperature gradient shimming routine that has become a standard component on most NMR machines and adapted for use with MRI machines.

After leaving graduate school, Clare gained industrial experience within the pharmaceutical and FMCG sectors as an analyst and formulation chemist developing drug delivery formulations.

In 2005, Clare returned to academia and completed a PhD in chemistry at the University of Nottingham where she studied the dynamics and folding of proteins implicated in neurodegeneration using both molecular dynamics simulations and, once more, NMR spectroscopy.

Her interest in protein folding and disease led Clare to Seattle where she is now a senior fellow in the Daggett Lab working on the Dynameomics project (http://dynameomics.org). Her goal is to investigate a possible conformational basis for neuroprotection in order to engineer future therapies for neurodegenerative disease.