User Portlet

Brief CV
Philip W. Kuchel BMedSc(hons), MB BS, PhD, DSc(hc) AM, FBHI, FAA E-mail: philip.kuchel@sydney.edu.au

Philip is known for applying NMR spectroscopy to cellular systems to probe their metabolism, membrane transport on the sub-second time scale, and the rates of diffusion of solutes, including proteins, inside cells. He was appointed to a Chair of Biochemistry at the University of Sydney in 1980, and in 2013 was made Emeritus Professor. He is the coordinating author of ‘Schaum’s Outline of Theory and Problems of Biochemistry’ McGraw-Hill (now in its 3rd edition), and coauthor of ‘Modelling Metabolism with Mathematica’ CRC Press, amongst other books and monograph chapters. His ~500 scientific papers include the first description of 1H spin-echo NMR spectroscopy used to monitor metabolism in cells (1977); the transmembrane ‘split peak effect’ (1985) that is used to measure rapid membrane transport; the first observation of ‘diffusion-diffraction’ of water in a cellular system (1996); and most recently the first NMR-based demonstration of enhanced metabolic and cation transport in red blood cells by mechanically straining them; this is in the general area of biological molecular mechano-sensation. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (1997), the International Society for Magnetic Resonance (2015), and the British Horological Institute (2020). In 2016 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Biochemical Education and Research. He is a former President of the Australian Society for Biophysics (1988-1989), and the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (1994-1996).

Less formally: (1) Invented the circle inverting anamorphoscope, described in The Mathematical Gazette, 63, 82-89 (1979); and followed up in The Mathematica Journal 9, 1-7 (2004). (2) Invented the descending pendulum clock, Horological Journal, 132, 181-216 (1989), and also translated into German in Uhren 16, 26-30 (1993). (3) Identified the underlying polyhedron in the Jabulani football as a truncated truncated tetrahedron, front cover of The Mathematical Gazette 96, 317-323 (2102), and now an entry as "JabulaniPolyhedron" in PolyhedronData in Mathematica.