Robert Lazenby was born in Beverley, England in August 1988, and grew up in the quiet village of North Ferriby, England. Interested in science and technology, he chose Chemistry for his undergraduate study, attracted by its role as the central science. In 2006, he moved to Coventry to pursue an MChem degree in Chemistry with Industrial Training, at the University of Warwick, England. In his third year Robert worked for the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, where he was responsible for testing novel detection platforms coupled to high performance liquid chromatography, for universal calibration-free quantitation.
In the final year of his undergraduate degree, he carried out a master’s research project on metal electrodeposition in ionic liquids, under the supervision of Prof. Patrick Unwin and Prof. Julie Macpherson in the Warwick electrochemistry and interfaces group. He remained in the group to pursue a PhD in Chemistry, where he developed electrochemical microscopy techniques, including hopping mode scanning and using nanoelectrodes with intermittent contact-scanning electrochemical microscopy. He completed his PhD in 2015, and stayed another year in the group with postdoctoral funding from Unilever.
In the Summer of 2016, he moved to the University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA, to carry out postdoctoral research in biosensing platforms. He has been interested in using ion channels as specific molecule sensors and using electrochemical, aptamer-based sensors. This work was under the supervision of Prof. Ryan White, with whom Robert moved to the University of Cincinnati in the Summer of 2017, to set up a new lab and continue his postdoctoral research. Robert will be joining Florida State University in the fall of 2019, as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He intends to develop novel micro- and nanoscale biosensing probes that can be used to monitor specific target molecules in various biological systems.