Physical Sciences

Dr Shailesh Jain, PhD

Dr Shailesh Jain received his doctoral degree in Molecular Microbiology from the Ulster University, Northern Ireland. After pursuing postdoctoral research for a year at the University of Manchester, UK, Shailesh started his career in the publishing industry. He has published five academic research manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals and has presented at several prestigious conferences. He currently works as a part-time freelance scientific editor, with a focus on editing manuscripts written by authors whose first language is not English. His areas of specialization include Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, Genomics, and Proteomics

Dr Arshad Makhdum, MSc, PhD

Dr Arshad Makhdum obtained an undergraduate degree in Applied Chemistry from the University of Greenwich. He went on to earn an MSc and PhD in clinical pharmacology from University College London (UCL). Postdoctoral studies in allergic disease took him to the position of Senior Research Fellow at UCL. Then, he was recruited to the Scripps Institute in San Diego (CA, USA), where he focused on exercise-induced asthma. He also taught physicians and surgeons the basic science underpinning allergic disease at this elite research centre. Dr Makhdum returned to the UK and started a career in academic publishing, reaching the position of Publisher at Elsevier (Oxford, UK) and Senior Editorial Project Executive at Phase II Communications (Surrey, UK).

Dr Makhdum has been a STEM editor and medical writer for two decades. He specializes in editing content from authors whose first language is not English. Dr Makhdum also has considerable expertise in what is required for a manuscript to be accepted in a particular journal. His areas of specialization are internal medicine, surgery, anaesthesia, allergic disease (particularly asthma), clinical pharmacology, physiology, molecular biology, and chemistry. He has been working with OSE since November 2012.

He is an Associate Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, Member of the British Pharmacological Society, Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, as well as a Member of the European Association of Science Editors, European Medical Writers Association, Medical Journalists Association, and Guild of Health Writers.

Dr Philippa Cranwell, MSc, PhD

Philippa gained an MChem in chemistry from the University of Southampton, then a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Cambridge. After completing her PhD, she moved to ETH Zurich for postdoctoral studies working with Professor Erick Carreira. She returned to the UK to an academic position at the University of Reading. In 2022 she moved to become head of research at a local SME, working with external customers and preparing marketing material and case-studies. In October 2023 she officially took the plunge to become a freelance writer, supporting OSE with preparation of technical articles. Philippa has published extensively within organic chemistry and chemistry education, written three textbooks, presented work at numerous national and international conferences. Her areas of expertise include organic chemistry, analytical chemistry and biochemistry.

Dr Jay Freeman, PhD

Dr Jay Freeman obtained his BSc in Chemistry from York University and his MSc in Advanced Organic Chemistry from the University of East Anglia (UEA). His PhD research on the synthesis of derivatized amino acids and their use in the self-assembly of supramolecular transition-metal structures was conducted at UEA and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. For the next decade, he worked for a Cambridge-based independent drug-discovery company as a medicinal chemist, designing and synthesising kinase and epigenetic inhibitors, and then at University College London on the development of biopolymer-based drug-delivery systems. During this time, he was named as an inventor on a number of patents and co-authored several journal articles.

He has been a full-time Freelance Science Editor and Writer for almost ten years, during which time he has edited around 1500 papers – several hundred of which have been for OSE – on almost every aspect of the chemical sciences. However, he enjoys new challenges and always seizes opportunities to edit in subject areas beyond his main expertise when they arise, a tendency that has seen his portfolio expand into molecular biology, medicine, physics, biomaterials, cell biology, and even the arts and humanities.

While he has extensive experience in formatting, scientific writing, and figure preparation, his speciality is advising scientists for whom English is a second language and facilitating the publication of their research in high-impact journals.

Joyce Fernandez, BEng

Joyce Fernandez is an accomplished academic editor, having edited thousands of academic documents authored by researchers from around the world. She has a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical Engineering) degree, and she worked for more than 9 years as an academic editor at one of the world’s leading providers of editing and other academic services. There, in addition to independently editing manuscripts, she was also responsible for reviewing the work of freelance and junior editors. Since leaving this firm in 2019, she has been working as a freelance editor with a few different editing companies and specializes in editing documents in physical sciences, particularly materials science. Over the past 14 years, Joyce has built expertise in editing manuscripts written by authors whose native language is not English, especially academics from China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.