Eric Oldfield (born 1948) is a British chemist, the Harriet A. Harlin Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is known for his work in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy of lipids, proteins, and membranes; of inorganic solids; in computational chemistry, and in microbiology and parasitology. He has received a number of recognitions for his work, including the American Chemical Society’s Award in Pure Chemistry, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Meldola Medal and the Biochemical Society’s Colworth Medal, and he is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Early life and education
Oldfield was born in London, England on May 23, 1948. He attended the University in Bristol doing research with Jake MacMillan on diterpenes and Geoffrey Eglinton on lipids and isoprenoids. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1969. He obtained a PhD in Biophysical Chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 1972, with Dennis Chapman, developing NMR methods to study lipid and membrane structure. He worked as a Research Associate and EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University with Adam Allerhand, on the development of high-resolution NMR of proteins (1972–1974) and was then a Visiting Scientist at MIT with John S. Waugh (1974-1975), working on solid-state NMR.
Career
Oldfield joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975 as an assistant Professor of Chemistry. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1980 and was a Professor from 1982 to 2002. He was then an Alumni Research Professor of Chemistry from 2003 to 2013 and since then has been the Harriet A. Harlin Professor of Chemistry. He has also been a Professor of Biophysics in the Center for Computational Biology and Biophysics since 1995 and was a Fellow in the Center for Advanced Study in 1979, a Richard G. and Carole J. Cline University Senior Scholar in 1995, and an Associate in the Center for Advanced Study in 2000. He has authored 450 publications and as of 2023, has an h-index of 104 with 35,000 citations, according to Google Scholar and holds nine issued patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Research
Oldfield is known for his research in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, and drug discovery. His invention of deuterium and proton NMR methods led to new ways to study the structures of lipids and membranes; his carbon-13 NMR and quantum chemical developments led to new ways to investigate protein structures; his investigations of quadrupolar nuclei led to new research in materials science, geochemistry and catalysis, and his more recent research using NMR, computational and crystallographic methods has led to the development of new therapeutic approaches to treating both infectious diseases and cancer, targeting lipid biosynthesis.
NMR of lipids and membranes
In the 1970s and 1980s Oldfield developed ways to investigate lipid and membrane structure including the use of 2H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of labelled compounds. This method enabled the determination of the static and dynamic structures of lipids, and how they interact with proteins and sterol molecules such as cholesterol. In addition, he developed 1H and 13C magic-angle sample-spinning methods to investigate lipid membranes without the need for isotopic labeling. The magic-angle technique was not thought to be applicable to 1H NMR (due to strong dipolar interactions), but he showed that due to fast axial diffusion, these interactions were scaled and that remarkably high-resolution spectra could be obtained.