Wenhan has arrived in Joel’s lab in Jan 2026, fresh from a Masters at Imperial College in London, to start an ambitious PhD project of designing cyclic peptides using AI-driven computational approaches. If successful, this work will sit alongside our RaPID mRNA display platform for the design of potent, selective peptide ligands.
PI with longstanding interests in gene regulation, structural biology, statistics/data analysis, bike touring, rogaining, trail running – and cats.
PI with personal chair – hooping name “Alpha Helix” and recent past President of the ASBMB.
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.
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 show.
Following a PhD in Brazil and postdoctoral time with Ray Norton at Monash, Karol has joined Joel’s lab – bring expertise in protein biochemistry and structural biology (NMR even!) to dive into the mechanisms underlying transcriptional regulation. She also has the disctinction of being the first South American in the lab (though not the first Portuguese speaker…)! Bem-vinda!
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.
Fresh from a PhD at the University of Adelaide, where he solved a crystal structure every few weeks, it seems, Jordan is working with Joel (and Rich Payne and the local biotech INSAMO) to design a new class of protein degraders. Perhaps the first South Australian to join the lab…(currently unconfirmed).
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…
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…
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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 real-time single-molecule exploration of CHD4 activity in live cells.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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… 🙂
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.
Undergraduate intern from Techniek College Rotterdam, just finished the better part of a year getting a taste of academic research down under. Worked with Lihua to explore the newly accessible world of AI-guided protein design! Like any good Dutchman, the first thing he did was buy a bike… (good to see). Unfortunately, the second thing was getting it stolen (not so good an ad for Sydney)… Fortunately, he has still decided to come back to the lab once he has graduated – after we looked into about 15 different possible options, we finally found one that would work!
Lab web site consultant – and simultaneously research associate with Dr Yu Heng Lau in the School of Chemistry
PhD student working with Joel. Has come to us from Tabriz in the northern reaches of Iran – but via Sydney, where she spent a year as a 10-year-old while her father was doing a sabbatical in our Department (learning protein NMR spectroscopy). We obviously didn’t put her off and she’s back to try to develop safer, more selective insecticides using a target-based strategy.
Ansh is a 2026 BSc Hons student working with Joel and Zahra to understand more about transcriptional regulation in the Varroa mite, with the goal of designing acaricides that are safer for bees and people!
Chen Long is a BSc Hons student with Joel who is jumping on the AI protein design train – looking to make new proteins that bind to transcriptional regulators – perhaps even in a paralogue-specific way…