Doctoral student in Medicinal Chemistry Matthew Holland, who is supervised by CMD Director Professor Paul Brennan, presented and commentated on this year’s Boat Race on BBC One, and had a feature in Tatler Magazine. Having won the Boat Race twice whilst an undergraduate at Cambridge, this is the fourth year that Matthew has been involved with the BBC One broadcast. His project focusses on the discovery and synthesis of novel aromatic heterocyclic bioisosteres of common drug moieties, and although this takes up much of his time, he still maintains a keen interest and small involvement in national and World Rowing.
“It is in immense privilege to be involved in broadcasting The Boat Races every year. I derived a great deal of pleasure from rowing when I was an undergraduate, and the opportunity to communicate the exciting intricacies of the sport and the race to people at home is hugely enjoyable. For me there is a terrific parallel between communicating science and communicating rowing; both initially seem to have a high barrier in terms of required background understanding, but actually they are both built on basic founding principles which, if explained properly, can simplify a great wealth of complexity.”
You can watch his commentary, and the Boat Races, on BBC iPlayer and YouTube, and a link to his article in Tatler is below:
https://www.tatler.com/article/the-boat-race-2024-matthew-holland