Dr Rob van Montfort studies target-directed cancer drug discovery, focusing on protein-ligand interactions, using structural biology and a range of biochemical and biophysical methods. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry and PhD in protein crystallography at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He did his postdoctoral research at Birkbeck College (University of London), where he became interested in proteins involved in stress response. In 2001, he joined Astex Therapeutics in Cambridge where he became an expert in fragment-based drug discovery. In 2007 Dr van Montfort joined the ICR, where he holds a joint position between the CR-UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit and the Division of Structural Biology. He currently leads the Hit Discovery and Structural Design Team, which is responsible for hit identification and characterisation of advanced inhibitors the drug discovery projects of the Unit. He closely collaborates medicinal and computational chemists, biologists and DMPK experts at the ICR and externally.