Ruth Cameron directs the Cambridge Centre for Medical Materials together with Professor Serena Best.  Her multidisciplinary research concerns materials that interact therapeutically with the body. Professor Cameron's work has received widespread recognition including the award of an ERC Advanced Grant. She was awarded the UKSB President’s Prize in 2017, the IOM3 Griffith Medal and Prize in 2018, and the IOP Rosalind Franklin Medal and Prize in 2019 for her work in regenerative medicine and pharmaceutical delivery. 

Serena Best is Professor of Materials Science and a Fellow of St. John’s College, and directs the Cambridge Centre for Medical Materials together with Professor Ruth Cameron. Her research interests encompass bioactive ceramics, coatings, composites and scaffolds for skeletal- and soft tissue repair and regeneration. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), a Fellow of the Societies Associated with Biomaterials Science and Engineering (FBSE) also a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM).

Gonçalo Bernardes is a Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Cambridge . After completing his D.Phil. degree in 2008 at the University of Oxford, UK, he then performed postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, the ETH Zürich. He started his independent research career in 2013 at the University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2018 he was appointed University Lecturer and was promoted to Reader in 2019 and to Full Professor in 2022.

Gonçalo is the recipient of three European Research Council grants; and has won many accolades during his career, including the 2024 Corday-Morgan Prize for Chemistry from the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to provide new biological insights and derive new targeted therapeutics. Finally, he has co-founded a number of companies that use technologies developed in his lab. He is a first generation high-school and university graduate in his family.

Professor Melinda Duer is Professor of Biological and Biomedical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. She studies the molecular structure of the body’s tissues – especially the extracellular matrix, the scaffold that gives tissues their strength and structure. Using powerful analytical tools such as NMR spectroscopy alongside optical, Raman, and electron microscopy, she can probe tissues at the molecular and nanoscale, uncovering how their structure supports cell function and how it changes in disease. Her work reveals how the extracellular matrix is altered in cancer, degenerative diseases, and ageing, providing new opportunities for therapeutic development in degenerative diseases such as vascular calcification (hardening of the arteries). In 2018, she founded Cambridge Oncology Ltd to develop new cancer therapies. Her pioneering work has earned major scientific honours, including the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Interdisciplinary Prize, the Suffrage Science Award, and the Franco-British Prize from the Société Chimique de France. Melinda is also an active science communicator, sharing her enthusiasm for discovery through radio, television, and public talks.