MACKAY & MATTHEWS LAB

Protein structure, function and engineering

Chen Long Chiao

Chen Long Chiao

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…
Ansh Kumar

Ansh Kumar

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!
Wenhan Hu

Wenhan Hu

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...
Mahrokh Dastmalchi

Mahrokh Dastmalchi

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...
Ivan Jansen

Ivan Jansen

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...