Dr Mark Wormald - Personal History
(or at least the bits I am prepared to share with you)

Academic :
 

1981-1985 : Chemistry Degree (1st class) at St. John's College, Oxford.
1985-1988 : D.Phil. in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, Oxford, with Prof. R.J.P. Williams, F.R.S. 
"An investigation of some interface phenomena using NMR".
1989- : Oxford Glycobiology Institute, Department of Biochemistry, Oxford.
1996- : Member of the Sub-Faculty of Biochemistry, Oxford.
1990-1993 : Junior Research Fellowship, Corpus Christi College.
 
Having started out as a chemist, I moved into the fields of bioinorganic chemistry and biophysics for my doctorate and now into biochemistry because this seems to be where all the most interesting chemistry problems are to be found. I am still a chemist at heart, but then biochemistry is a just sub-set (the really complicated and fun bits) of chemistry (and, before you point it out, chemistry is just a sub-set of physics). I have not yet stopped marvelling at how elegant a chemist nature is.

My general interests lie in understanding the physical and physico-chemical properties, at an atomic level, of biological molecules and using this information to explain their function. My favourite theory (for which I have no direct evidence) is that the most simple and beautiful solution to a problem is the one that nature will have chosen (I once based half of a lecture I gave at Purdue University on this theory, but that's another story). 
 

Teaching :
 
I was appointed a college lecturer in chemistry at Corpus Christi College in 1988 and have done all the college teaching in inorganic chemistry since then. In 1992 I started tutoring the biochemistry undergraduates at Corpus on biophysics, bioinorganic chemistry and glycobiology.

Since 1990 I have also been giving lecture courses for undergraduates in the Department of Biochemistry.