Serial crystallographic studies of radiation sensitive macromolecules

Oliver is an interdisciplinary scientist whose work focuses on developing computational methods for structural biology. During his PhD, Oliver worked on a computational model of how long biological samples can last during experiments to determine their atomic structures using X-ray sources. More recently, his research focus has been on developing new tools for handling the heterogeneity inherent to serial crystallography using ultra-bright sources. Because only a single image can be obtained from each sample, atomic models have to be built up from hundreds to tens of thousands of samples. By using a combination of physical modelling and machine-learning techniques, Oliver aims to develop improved computation methods to model these sources of variance, leading to an increased radius of convergence for challenging samples and allowing new biological insights to be obtained.