Assistant Professor of Chemical Biology
Research themes
Synthetic biology, gene editing, molecular biology, protein engineering, bioengineering.
Biography
- 2023 - present: Assistant Professor of Chemical Biology at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
- 2018 - 2023: Postdoctoral Research Fellow in gene editing with Professor David Liu at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA
- 2013 - 2018: PhD in genetic code expansion with Professor Jason Chin at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK
- 2009 - 2013: Studied Natural Sciences (Chemistry) at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Current research
The common theme across our scientific work is exploring natural diversity to identify proteins with novel functions or properties, studying and characterising them, and finally engineering them to create new technologies.
We study a fascinating and unusual class of viruses which use a unique mode of protein-primed DNA replication to propagate their linear DNA genomes. These represent one of the few known biological systems in which protein-DNA covalent bonds can be naturally found. This group of viruses is very understudied but hold great promise for exciting biotechnology applications. In particular, we are exploring how to repurpose these viral replication proteins to create innovative new tools for gene editing to treat human genetic disease.
