Professor Douglas Kell took his B.A. (Hons) Biochemistry at St John's College, Oxford (1975) (Class 2:1 with a Distinction in Chemical Pharmacology). He was a Senior Scholar of St John's College, Oxford and took his M.A. (Oxon) and D.Phil. (Oxon) degrees in 1978. From 1978 to 2002 he held various Fellowships and posts at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and was a Founding Director of Aber Instruments. In 1998 Aber Instruments received a Queen’s Award for Export Achievement. He moved to UMIST (now the University of Manchester) in 2002 and directed the Manchester Centre for Integraive Systems Biology.

Awards include the Fleming Award of the Society for General Microbiology (1986), a Royal Society of Chemistry Interdisciplinary Science Award (2004), the  FEBS-IUBMB Theodor Bücher Medal (2005), a Royal Society/Wolfson Merit Award (2005) and the Royal Society of Chemistry/Society of Analytical Chemistry Gold Medal (2006).  Since 2008 he has served as Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.  He has published some 400 papers, with an H-index of ca 66.  He has a Web presence at http://dbkgroup.org/, his blog is at http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk/ and he tweets as @dbkell.