Jonathan Doye is currently a University Lecturer in Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford, having previously been a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge and the Sir Alan Wilson Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 2000 he received the Harrison Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry in recognition of his work on the statistical mechanics of atomic clusters and polymer crystal growth. Dr Doye’s research is computational and lies in the field of chemical physics. Much of his work to date has been on clusters, energy landscapes and global optimization, but he is now increasingly applying computational techniques to questions of biophysical interest, such as protein crystallization and the self-assembly of protein complexes and DNA nanostructures.

Dr Doye was a member of the Cambridge Templeton Consortium for the Emergence of Biological Complexity, which ran a $3 million request for proposals on behalf of the John Templeton Foundation in 2005. He was jointly responsible for the ‘biochemistry and fine-tuning’ programme.

Selected recent science publications

  • The structure and stability of atomic liquids: from clusters to bulk Science 271, 484-487 (1996)
  • Global optimization by basin-hopping and the lowest energy structures of Lennard-Jones clusters containing up to 110 Atoms J. Phys. Chem. A, 101, 5111-5116 (1997)
  • Thermodynamics of global optimization, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 1357-1360 (1998)
  • Mechanism of thickness determination in polymer crystals, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 2160-2163 (1998)
  • Entropic effects on the size dependence of cluster structure, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 3570-3573 (2001)
  • Polytetrahedral clusters, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 5719-5722 (2001)
  • Evidence of kinetic trapping in clusters of C60 molecules, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 075503 (2002)
  • The network topology of a potential energy landscape: A static scale-free network,
    Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 238701 (2002)
  • Inhibition of protein crystallization by evolutionary negative design Physical Biology 1, P9-P13 (2004)
  • Mapping the magic numbers in binary Lennard-Jones clusters Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 063401 (2005)
  • Controlling crystallization and its absence: Proteins, colloids and patchy models, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 9, 2197-2205 (2007)
  • Reversible self-assembly of patchy particles into monodisperse icosahedral clusters, J. Chem. Phys. 127, 085106 (2007)
  • The self-assembly and evolution of homomeric protein complexes, Phys. Rev. Lett 102, 118106 (2009)

Recent publications in science and religion

  • Soul-Searching: A review of Francis Crick’s latest book (The Astonishing Hypothesis: the scientific search for the soul), Evangelicals Now, March 1995.
  • Evidence for design in the physical universe?, CiS conference paper 1995.
  • Contemporary perspectives on chance, providence and free will: A critique of some modern authors, Science & Christian Belief, 7, 117-139 (1995)
  • Review of ‘Nature’s Imagination: The frontiers of scientific vision’ (ed. J. Cornwell), Science & Christian Belief, 11, 83-84 (1999)

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