Nicholas J. Turner obtained his DPhil in 1985 with Prof. Sir Jack Baldwin and from 1985 to 1987 was a Royal Society Junior Research Fellow, spending time at Harvard University with Prof. George Whitesides. He was appointed lecturer in 1987 at Exeter University and moved to Edinburgh in 1995, initially as a reader and subsequently as a professor in 1998. In October 2004 he joined the University of Manchester as Professor of Chemical Biology, where his research group is located in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB). He is Director of the Centre of Excellence in Biocatalysis (CoEBio3) and a Co-Director of SYNBIOCHEM, the BBSRC Synthetic Biology Research Centre. He is also a cofounder of Ingenza. His research interests are in the area of biocatalysis with particular emphasis on the discovery and development of novel enzyme catalyzed reactions for applications in organic synthesis. His group are also interested in the application of directed evolution technologies for the development of biocatalysts with tailored functions.