Dr Christopher Hall receives Selby Research Award

Dr Christopher Hall has received the 2022 Selby Research Award to develop a new technique for probing drug structure and bonding.

The award is presented annually to outstanding academics to establish their research career in chemistry and chemistry-related fields.

Dr Hall received this year’s $21,000 prize for his project 'Probing drug-target interactions under physiological conditions' which will utilise ultrafast infrared laser spectroscopy to gain a better understanding of drug-target interactions under physiological conditions and help address challenges in the development of new pharmaceuticals.

As a physical chemist with a background in photochemistry and laser spectroscopy, Dr Hall is interested in resolving mechanisms and reaction pathways in photochemical systems.

He completed his PhD at Swinburne University of Technology in 2011, studying engineered excitonic states in semiconductor nanostructures.

In 2017, Dr Hall joined the Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence in Exciton Science (ACEx) in the School of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne where he studies fundamental processes in excitonic materials.

In 2021 he was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to develop new ultrafast multidimensional spectroscopies to correlate electronic and vibrational dynamics in photochemical systems.

Following grant success via the Australian National Competitive Grant Program in 2020, Dr Hall will co-develop a transient infrared spectroscopy facility at the University of Melbourne, the first of its kind in Australia.