Shamus Burns

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Last updated 27th March 2023

After my first degree in Chemistry at Royal Holloway College I pursued biochemistry research and undertook a PhD using NMR to investigate metabolic disease. I continued to do Post-Doctoral research in liver biochemistry at Queen Mary’s School of Medicine, being appointed as a Lecturer in the new Medical School in 2000. My work there revealed a novel mechanism by which the liver could regulate blood glucose, and much of my subsequent work is related to biochemical mechanisms of glycemic homoestasis instigated by the hexokinase class of enzymes. After discovering a mammalian polyphosphate dependent glucokinase that is inhibited by ATP my work is now acutely foucsed on understanding how very similar active sites in different hexokinases can discriminate between different phosphorylation substrates. A molecular explanation for this specificity will impact directly on our understanding of the role of glucokinase in diabetes and hexokinases in cancer. Our novel NMR enzymology now gives us the power to answer key questions about how hexokinases obtain their specificity that have remianed unanswered for decades. I moved to the Department of Chemical and Biological Sciences (now Biological and Geographical Sciences) at Huddersfield in the Summer of 2004, taking on significant new teaching duties as a senior Lecturer, and appointed to Subject Leader (Biochemical sciences) in 2014. 

I am an active member of the Biochemical Society (the Local Ambassador at Huddersfield and a previous member of Council (2011) and I regulalry paritcipate in promoting biochemsitry in local Schools.