Dr Christian Orr
Following his undergraduate and masters in biochemistry at the University of Portsmouth, Christian completed his PhD at the University of Southampton and University of Hamburg. His thesis focussed on the design of monoclonal antibodies in cancer immunotherapy, with a particular focus on hinge region disulphide bond patterns. Christian joined Diamond after his PhD as a post-doc on beamline I23 and has since transferred to beamline scientist.
Research Interests
Christian's research involves methods development for long wavelength crystallography, design and implementation of a crystal laser shaping system to enable new experiments on I23 and data collection/processing software development to make the best use anomalous crystallographic data. He is interested in the application of machine learning to macromolecular crystallography, such as the use of computer vision, classifiers and AlphaFold.
Following on from his PhD work, Christian collaborates with groups from Southampton University, helping to design anti-cancer therapeutics using site-directed mutagenesis. He also collaborates with labs internationally to answer their scientific questions using long wavelength macromolecular crystallography techniques. As part of these projects, Christian use the crystallisation facility at Research Complex to optimise user crystals for shaping and long wavelength experiments.
