Grants and Fellowships

  1. Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Carnegie Corporation of New York Postdoctoral Fellow). The "Next Generation of Academics in Africa" project at the University of cape Town, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY). 2014 Grant Recipient.


Rodrick did his Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Carnegie Corporation of New York Postdoctoral Fellow) in Dr. Zenda Woodman’s HIV: Structure-Function and Viral Fitness Research Group at the University of Cape Town, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. He was working on the molecular mechanisms involved in the transmission of HIV, focusing on the gp140 envelope protein trimers. The project involved the expression, purification, biophysical, biochemical, and antigenicity analysis of gp140 trimers from transmitter/founder and chronic viruses and pseudovirus neutralization assays that could pave the way for HIV preclinical and clinical vaccine trials. Experiments were designed to understand the role of envelope N-glycosylation in viral fitness. A panel of site-directed glycosylation mutants was generated to investigate the role of specific potential glycosylation sites in transmission.


  1. Sheffield University, MPhil/Ph.D. Scholarship under the BBSRC's Membrane Protein Structure Initiative Grant

In 2004, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), as part of their Structural Proteomics of Rational Targets (SPoRT) initiative, funded the MPSi (Membrane Protein Structure initiative) consortium. MPSi was formed from most of the leading UK university-based groups involved in determining the structure and function of membrane proteins. It contains groups from the Universities of Glasgow, Leeds, Sheffield, Oxford, Manchester, Imperial College, Birkbeck College, and Daresbury Laboratory. The main aim of this consortium was, using predominantly prokaryotic transporters and ion channels, to establish high-throughput methods designed to overcome the main bottlenecks in the processes involved in determining the structures of membrane proteins. At the same time, there was the intention to embed the full range of skills required to breech these bottlenecks in each of the participating laboratories. Adopting high throughput strategies requires automation, and the MPSi grant funded state-of-the-art robotics to help achieve this.