Professor Nigel Hooper, University of Leeds - Series Editor

Nigel Hooper received his Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Leeds in 1987. He was then awarded a Mr and Mrs John Jaffé Donation Research Fellowship from the Royal Society to work on the proteolysis and membrane anchorage of mammalian cell surface peptidases. In 1989 he was appointed as lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry at Leeds and he is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Director of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Leeds. His research has focused on characterizing several mammalian zinc metalloproteinases at the molecular and cellular level, including angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) and its novel homologue ACE2. More recently he has been investigating the proteolysis and cellular processing of the Alzheimer's amyloid precursor protein and the prion protein, including the role of cholesterol-rich membrane rafts in these processes. His work has relevance for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and prion diseases ('mad cow disease'), and cardiovascular disease.