Professor Robert Poole is West Riding Professor of Microbiology at the University of Sheffield. He has >35 years experience of bacterial physiology and bioenergetics, in particular O2-, CO- and NO-reactive proteins, and has published >300 papers (h=48, 2013). He was Chairman of the Plant and Microbial Sciences Committee of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and has held numerous grants from BBSRC, the Wellcome and Leverhulme Trusts and the EC. He coordinates an international SysMO systems biology consortium. He published pioneering studies of bacterial oxidases and globins and discovered the bacterial flavohaemoglobin gene (hmp) and its function in NO detoxification He recently published the first systems analyses of responses of bacteria to novel carbon monoxide-releasing molecules (CORMs) and is a world leader in NO, CO and CORM research. Professor David Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Microbial Physiology at the University of Sheffield. He has >35 years research expertise in bacterial physiology and biochemistry, membrane protein transport processes and bioenergetics, and has worked with the zoonotic food-borne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni for >25 years. His laboratory has been engaged in a major program to study C. jejuni physiology, in particular the responses to oxygen, many aspects of carbon metabolism and functional analysis of the electron transport chains. He has long-standing interests in membrane transport mechanisms and in the 1990s discovered an entirely new class of periplasmic binding-protein dependent prokaryotic solute transporters, the TRAP transporters, now known to be common in a diverse range of bacteria and archaea. He has published >150 papers (h=42, 2021), held numerous grants, served on grant committees and has been a regular invited speaker at national and international conferences.
