Professor Paul Engel is professor of biochemistry at University College Dublin. He has had extensive experience teaching biochemistry to undergraduate and postgraduate biochemistry, biology,  medicine, engineering and nursing students, in his current post at UCD and at the universities of Sheffield, Oxford and Hong Kong,. He is on the Editorial Board of Biochemical Journal, and Essays in Biochemistry, and is the author of the highly successful textbook: Enzyme Kinetics (Outline Series) published by Chapman and Hall.

Professor Paul Cowper Engel: School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science, Conway Institute, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

From AQ:
Wrote (some years ago!) a highly successful little book in the Chapman & Hall Outline Studies in Biology series - Enzyme Kinetics, the Steady State Approach. This was their best-selling title, sold fairly rapidly out of two printing of 6000 copies each and has been stolen from many libraries since it went out of print!  It did not continue because of a dispute between myself, wanting to stick with my readers, impecunious students, and the publishers, who wanted a fatter money-spinning (?) volume that students would not be able to afford.   At long last I'm working on a new version.

I also have about 160 full papers on a wide variety of enzyme-related topics ranging from chemistry to medicine and protein evolution. My current research group of about 15, supported primarily by a Senior Research Fellowship from Science Foundation Ireland, is working on novel biocatalysis through protein engineering and random mutagenesis, protein folding, anti-malarial drugs etc.

I have been lecturing in university biochemistry courses since 1970 in the UK and in Ireland to a wide variety of students - science, medicine, chemical engineering, nursing and have had ample opportunity to realise the distinctive problems of different groups on confronting what is undoubtedly a complex and intimidating subject - biochemistry. In particular in the Irish context I dealt with Nursing students who either had done little or no chemistry a school or else had done it so long ago that it was long forgotten. My book recognises this problem and incorporates essential basic chemistry introduced a little at a time as required.

I have been increasingly aware of the need for interdisciplinarity in scientific research and to that end initiated both the Krebs Institute at Sheffield and the Conway Institute at University College Dublin, bringing together scientists with different skills. Another interest has been the promotion of public understanding of science and I started a programme at UCD which gets all our Ph. D. students to think and learn about how to explain themselves to a lay audience. Along with this there is a poster competition and the best posters go on the local trains and stations.