Dr. Jasper Van Thor

Biography

Jasper J. van Thor is a Professor of Molecular Biophysics at Imperial College London. He obtained his MSc in Chemistry from the University of Amsterdam in 1993, followed by a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1999, focused on oxygenic photosynthesis. He joined the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford in 2000 under Dame Louise Johnson, earning both the EMBO Research Fellowship and the HFSP Long Term Research Fellowship. In 2002, he was awarded the Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Oxford. He has been part of Imperial College London since 2007, where he established the Ultrafast Spectroscopy Laboratory and the Molecular Biophysics group, and serves as director of the Imperial College network of frontiers in ultrafast measurement and principal investigator at the Imperial College Laboratory for Ultrafast X-ray Diffraction (LUXD). His research employs ultrafast laser spectroscopy and ultrafast X-ray crystallography to investigate structural dynamics and develop theories in ultrafast science, particularly focusing on light-sensitive proteins, photoreceptors, and their role in photosynthesis. He has extensive experience with X-ray free electron lasers since 2010, using facilities like LCLS and SACLA, concentrating on ultrafast phenomena in molecular crystals.

Research Interests