A molecular view of gene regulation:
protein structure, function and engineering
BLOG / Photo Gallery
Structural biology’s annual Xmas croquet picnic – 2024 edition
Perfect weather and a newly renovated lawn greeted us upon arrival at the Marrickville Croquet Club – and of ...
Honours ice cream celebration!
The BSc Hons students for 2024 have given all the talks, submitted all the theses and generally ticked all the boxes ...
Clement’s iGEM team win big!
Clement (along with syn bio lab heads Dr Yu Heng Lau and Dr Constance Bailey) coached a team of undergraduate student...
Joel attends ICMRBS in Seoul – and checks out the impressive bike infrastructure of S. Korea
Travelled to Seoul for the ICMRBS NMR conference – with my old Ti road bike in tow to spend 3 days on 4 rivers ...
Joel tackles the Stoos Trail ultra in Switzerland
Report from Joel: To cap off a week of hiking with Jacqui in the Swiss alps last week – and get a last glimpse ...
May graduation, 2024
We had a bumper edition of graduation recently with Kim receiving her PhD and Andrea and Erekle graduating with their...
Auf wiedersehen Jakob…
Jakob Helmbrecht bravely ventured down under, risking crocodile attacks and leech bites to work in the lab under the ...
Lab alumnus Michael Webster publishes his first last-author paper – in Cell!
Michael, a BSc Hons student in the lab in 2012, now has an independent group leader position at the highly regarded J...
Lab walk in the Blue Mountains
We ventured out into the lower Blue Mountains for a day hike on Sat 24 Feb. The forecast was that there might be some...
The lab hits the big time on Youtube
We recently had a camera crew in the lab from Horticultural Innovation Australia. They are providing some funding for...
Lab Members
Prof. Joel Mackay
PI with longstanding interests in gene regulation, structural biology, statistics/data analysis, bike touring, rogaining, trail running – and cats.
...Prof. Jacqui Matthews
PI with personal chair – hooping name “Alpha Helix” and recent past President of the ASBMB.
...Hon Prof Ron Hill
Honorary Professor with a ton of experience (at CSIRO) in insect transcription factor structure and function – hoping to do some fundamental biochemistry and drug discovery.
...Dr Ingrid MacIndoe
Newly minted lab manager for the Structural Biology collective. After BSc Hons with Joel, a PhD with Margie and a school teaching sabbatical in Japan, and postdoctoral time with Joel learning (well, teaching herself) CRISPR gene editing (and with more diverse hair colours than before), she has decided that she wants to be running the […]
...Dr Anjumara Shaik
Research assistant working with Joel to design safer and more selective insecticides by targeting an essential ligand-binding transcription factor. Hoping these proteins will be more amenable than the methyltransferases she cut her teeth on in a collaboration with Alyson Ashe over the last couple of years. Those were ornery proteins…
...Dr Karishma Patel
Completed her (enormously productive) PhD with Joel in 2022 and, as of August 2024, has a postdoctoral position at Oxford with Prof Ivan Ahel. She still seems to know more about lab goings-on than Joel (you still hear “ask Karishma” fairly often…), so it feels like she should be an honorary current lab member…
...Dr Walter Becker
Austrian postdoc working collaboratively with Rich Payne in Chemistry. Came to us via Katja Petzold’s lab in Sweden and has retained his interest in doing NMR on challenging targets. Oh, and makes a mean sourdough!
...Paul Solomon
PhD student with Joel following on from TSP project. Wants to rebuild protein NMR data analysis from the bottom up – and build his own plane.
...Dr Milad Ghafoori
Postdoc arrived fresh from a structural biology PhD at Charles Sturt University with Jade Forwood (with a short detour to tool up in cryoEM at UNSW!) to work with Joel pursuing the design of selective insecticides targeting essential transcription factors.
...Xuefei Jing
PhD student working with Joel and Chandrika – bravely making her way across the Tasman to work on early phase drug discovery.
...Thu Vu
Research Assistant with Jacqui – continuing the family tradition of working in the lab here after her partner Cuong completed his PhD with Joel a few years ago.
...Jen Suh
PhD student working with Joel (after BSc Hons work in 2021) on a couple of different projects to keep her on her toes – both focused on the design of molecules to modulate gene transcription for therapeutic or agricultural outcomes.
...Lihua Yang
PhD student working with Joel to investigate the use of monobodies as reagents to modify the function of human transcription factors. Has come to the lab via China Pharmaceutical University and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow – though he doesn’t seem to have picked up a Glaswegian accent (thank goodness!).
...Clement Luong
BSc Hons student with Joel in 2022 who wasn’t deterred by the 200+ kDa of the CHD4 chromatin remodelling enzyme and has stayed on as a research assistant to look further under the hood at CHD4 activity. After dabbling in amber stop codon suppression technology, his eyes have (understandably) lit up at the prospect of […]
...Lucien Lambrechts
PhD student working with Joel (following Hons in 2022), who impressively walked the line between chemistry and biochemistry to get native chemical ligation up and running in the lab – part of our gateway to designer nucleosomes for unravelling some of the mechanistic mysteries of chromatin remodelling. Now to implement what he’s learned!
...Andrea Daners
PhD student working with Joel (following Hons in 2023) – focused on uncovering the mysteries of how CHD4 activity is regulated and well on her way to becoming the lab’s first genuine cryoEM practitioner.
...Erekle Kobakhidze
2023 BSc Hons student who worked with Joel (and Lucien and Clement) to try to unravel the mysteries of the (appallingly named) transcriptional regulator PWWP2A and its partners. Has stayed on as an RA prior to commencing the next stage of his research journey.
...Shahnaz Sultana
PhD student working with Joel. Coming to us all the way from Bangladesh to unravel the mysteries of gene regulation – and to modulate gene expression for useful outcomes!
...Zahra Falahati
PhD student working with Joel – has arrived in Sydney from Iran via Canada to battle the Varroa mite using an structure based insecticide discovery approach.
...Sebastian Pratama
PhD student working with Joel to design inhibitors of transcriptional regulators. Comes from industry with experience in expressing proteins in 8000-L vessels – so tempting to try making one of our proteins on that scale… 🙂
...Simone Titterton
2024 BSc Honours student working with Joel on the design of safer and more selective insecticides. Watch out if you’re a green peach aphid! Currently working as an RA with fingers in several pies.
...Ivan Jansen
Undergraduate intern from Techniek College Rotterdam, here for the better part of a year to get a taste of academic research down under. Working with Lihua to explore the newly accessible world of AI-guided protein design! Like any good Dutchman, the first thing he’s done is buy a bike… (good to see).
...Rezwan Siddiquee
Lab web site consultant – and simultaneously research associate with Dr Yu Heng Lau in the School of Chemistry
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