Emma graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a BSc (Hons) degree in Biochemistry and was awarded the Qiagen Prize for graduating top in her year. She then completed a PhD within the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of Dundee, where her work involved studying the structure and function of enzyme drug targets within the parasite Trypanosoma brucei.
During her work, Emma validated a previously unstudied metabolic pathway within the parasite as a drug target by gene knockout studies and subsequently solved the crystal structure of a key enzyme in this pathway, which now paves the way for structure-based drug design for anti-parasitic treatments.
Following her PhD, Emma worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Protein Crystallography Unit within the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Monash University. She was also part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Structural and Functional Microbial Genomics at Monash University.
Her postdoctoral work focused on using X-ray crystallography to determine the 3D structures of potential protein drug targets from disease-causing microorganisms, in order to understand their mechanisms of action for drug design purposes.
Emma has published her work in several high impact research journals, most recently in the Nature journal with an article entitled ‘Incorporation of a non-human glycan mediates human susceptibility to a bacterial toxin’. She has also presented her research at European, American and Australian conferences.
Emma joined FB Rice in 2008 and works in our Melbourne office.
