Kevin Whitley

Principal Investigator

Originally from St. Louis, Missouri (USA). After high school, Kevin couldn’t decide whether he liked biology or chemistry more (although leaned toward chemistry), so he chose to study biochemistry at the University of Arizona for a BSc. He worked in research labs all 4 years of his degree (federal work-study program, later a scholarship), mostly in Michael Cusanovich’s lab studying the mechanism of electron transport through cytochrome bc1 complex.

While an undergraduate, he realized that physics is actually really cool too, and so he pursued a PhD in biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (home of HAL9000!). He worked in Yann Chemla’s lab using optical tweezers and single-molecule fluorescence to investigate both the elasticity of nucleic acids at ‘ultrashort’ length scales and the mechanisms of the DNA-unwinding motor proteins called helicases.

After living in the middle of corn and soybean fields for 7 years(!), he was (very) ready for a change. He moved across the Atlantic to work as a postdoc shared between the labs of Cees Dekker (TU Delft, Netherlands) and Séamus Holden (Newcastle University, UK) to expand his single-molecule work into living cells. He investigated the molecular mechanism of bacterial cell division in the model species Bacillus subtilis while developing new methods for studying bacteria using nanofabrication, microfluidics, and advanced microscopy.

In 2022, Kevin was hired as a Lecturer (i.e. Assistant Professor) by Newcastle University to set up his own lab investigating bacterial biophysics. Staff profile

Current lab members

Jonathan Mitchell

PhD student (Funding: Newcastle University)

A Molecular Microbiology PhD student investigating how cell wall synthases build the cell wall in pole-growing bacteria. He graduated from University of Sheffield in 2023 with an MBiolSci in Biochemistry and Microbiology.