Letters: August 2022

John Fossey has died aged 44.

Fossey read chemistry at Cardiff University, graduating in 2000, followed by a PhD from Queen Mary University of London with Christopher Richards in 2004. Winning a postdoctoral fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), he worked with Shu Kobayashi at the University of Tokyo, during which time he met his wife-to-be Rumi, before returning to the UK in 2005 to take up a position at the University of Bath. In 2008 Fossey secured a permanent position as an independent group leader at the University of Birmingham, where he rose through the ranks from lecturer to become a professor of synthetic chemistry in 2018.

A former industry fellow of the Royal Society, where he collaborated with Syngenta, Fossey combined creativity and rigour with an inquisitive nature and a can-do attitude that allowed him to identify new opportunities and links between areas. He led diverse research projects spanning areas of organic and organometallic catalysis and synthesis to the development of new chemical detection methodologies, in particular carbohydrate sensors to improve the treatment of diabetes and for cancer diagnostics, and new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of tuberculosis and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

His contributions to research are recorded in over 120 publications and patents. He was awarded the Daiwa Adrian Prize in 2013 with Seiji Shinkai, Tony James, Steven Bull, Kazuo Sakurai, and Yuji Kubo for research into chemonostics and the inaugural Czarnik Emerging Investigator Award in 2016 for work on catalysis and sensing. In 2018 he was awarded a CRUK Pioneer Award to support his research in establishing early detection potential from single molecule chemosensors. He was also the principal investigator on a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation-funded project focused on translating boronic acid-mediated recognition to smart drug delivery.