Madeline is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Biology in the Institute of Chemistry at Leiden University in the Netherlands, a position which she has just started in January of this year after recently completing postdoctoral training in Professor Benjamin Cravatt's lab at Scripps Research.
Madeline originally earned her Bachelors and Master of Science degrees in Medicinal Chemistry and Immunobiology at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her thesis projects focused on the structure- and property-guided optimization of kinase inhibitors with anti-inflammatory properties for Parkinson's Disease, which she performed under the supervision of Professor Micheal Kassiou in the School of Chemistry. Madeline subsequently moved to the UK, to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of the late Professor Chris Abell. During her doctoral training, Madeline used fragment-based drug discovery techniques to characterize and develop small molecule inhibitors for enzymes that are essential for the pathogenicity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
After completing her thesis in 2017, Madeline worked briefly with Professor Chris Schofield at the University of Oxford on the development of metallo-beta-lactamase inhibitors to combat antibiotic resistance, before moving to San Diego to join Professor Ben Cravatt's lab at Scripps Research. Throughout her postdoc, Madeline has been interested in the potential for binding-based platforms, such as chemical proteomics, to discover novel small molecule binding sites that could be exploited to modulate proteins through unconventional mechanisms of action, which she will talk about today.
Madeline has received several notable awards throughout her career, including the University Medal and Australian Postgraduate Awards for her undergraduate and Master's research, a Commonwealth Scholarship to fund her PhD, ACS Young Chemist Crossing Boarders award, and a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship from the UK Wellcome Trust. She has also been invited to speak at several prominent drug discovery conferences, academic institutes, and industry symposia.
