Our team

In 2009, Chantelle moved to the University of New South Wales in the Immunvirology & Pathogenesis Program at the Kirby Institute, where she studies RNA-directed epigenetic silencing of HIV-1 and SIV.

Jake Baum is the Head of School of Medical Sciences at UNSW Sydney.

- Ph.D. in Infectious & Tropical Diseases. Co-evolution of Genetic Diversity in Malaria and Humans. London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (University of London), UK (1999-2002; awarded 31-08-2002).

- M.Sc. Human Biology. University of Oxford, Magdalen College, UK (1997-1998).

- B.A. Hons (M.A. Oxon). Biological Sciences. University of Oxford, St. Catherine’s College, UK (1993-1996).

Scott leads a research group investigating quantitative control of gene expression at the single-cell level – ranging from epigenetic memory and cellular decision-making to global RNA metabolism in the context of cellular physiology.

Prof. Cyrille Boyer is the codirector of Australian Centre for NanoMedicine and Deputy Head of School (Research), School of Chemical Engineering

A/Prof Chandrawati heads the Nanotechnology for Food and Medicine (NanoFAM) Laboratory. 

Kelly Clemens is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology, and Associate Dean of Impact Partnerships for the Faculty of Science, UNSW.

Kelly has studied at the University of Otago and the University of Sydney, with post-doctoral experience at the University of Bordeaux, France, and Macquarie University, Sydney, before establishing her own laboratory at UNSW in 2012. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of drug addiction, spanning basic science through to translational and industry engagement. 

Merlin is an enthusiastic science communicator, Chair of the Editorial Board of The Conversation, of UNSW Press, Deputy Director of the Australian Science Media Centre, a member of the Editorial Board of BioEssays, and an Honorary Associate of the Australian Museum.

Albert received his BS in Chemistry from Indiana University in 2008, having done research under the tutelage of Professor Amar Flood in synthetic and supramolecular chemistry.  He received his PhD from Northwestern University in Organic Chemistry in 2013 under the mentorship of Professor Sir Fraser Stoddart (Nobel Prize 2016) investigating the molecular self-assembly and template-directed syntheses of artificial molecular switches and machines.  Albert then moved to Boston to carry out research in origins of life chemistry as a postdoctoral scholar with Professor Jack Szostak (Nobel Prize 2009) at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital.  His research here focused on nonenzymatic RNA replication and prebiotic synthesis.  As part of a unique Fellowship opportunity during this time, Albert also spent three months of the year at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), a research center which specializes in origins of life research.  Thereafter, Albert spent a year with ELSI as an Associate Principal Investigator before moving to UNSW in September 2018.

Michelle Farrar is Professor of Paediatric Neurology at UNSW Sydney and specialist child neurologist at Sydney Children’s Hospital, leading the rare neurological diseases clinical and research programs.

I am a cellular immunologist specialised in vaccine development at the School of Biomedical Sciences, UNSW, and the UNSW RNA Institute.

Dr Fernandez is a genomic scientist & bioinformatician interested in understanding the role non-coding RNAs play in the evolution of gene regulatory landscapes within and across eukaryotes.

She is a Senior Lecturer RNA New Research Talent Program (Level C) funded by the UNSW RNA Institute. Her laboratory focuses on studying the evolution of long non-coding RNAs in various plants and animals to predict their functions better using bioinformatic tools and genomic approaches. She is particularly interested in how these could be leveraged to impact food production and disease in crops and humans. 

Dr Fernandez holds a BSc in Genomic Sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (2007). She completed her doctorate at the University of Queensland (UQ), studying new classes of small RNAs with Prof. John Mattick in 2013. As a postdoc, she used comparative genomics to identify regulatory changes that facilitated the evolution of multicellular organisms and morphological diversity in the animal kingdom in the laboratory of Prof. Bernie Degnan, UQ (2012-2015). She then returned to her native Mexico as a Principal Investigator at the Advanced Genomics Unit of Cinvestav (2016-2023) before joining UNSW as a Senior Lecturer in mid-2023.  

Dr Fernandez was awarded the Mexico national scholarship L’Oreal-UNESCO-AMC-CONACYT for Women in Science in 2016, the International Rising Talents Fellowship of L’Oreal-UNESCO in 2018 and the Gender Equality Award by the International Union of Immunological Societies in 2019. She is a founding member of Mas Ciencia por Mexico (More Science for Mexico), the Mexican Network of Bioinformatics (Red Mexicana de Bioinformática), and a volunteer instructor of Software Carpentry and previously Clubes de Ciencia Mexico.

She has served as a volunteer mentor at foundations such as Ekpapalek and the “Mujeres en STEM: Futuras Líderes” program of the US-Mexico Foundation. Forbes Mexico magazine selected her as one of the 100 most powerful women in Mexico in 2018. She was recently elected in the competitive female climate leadership program 'Homeward Bound' and is part of #TeamHB8.

Scientia Professor Justin Gooding is currently an NHMRC Leadership Fellow and a co-director of the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine.

Zi (Sophia) Gu is an Associate Professor and Head of NanoBiotechnology Research Laboratory at School of Chemical Engineering of UNSW.

David leads the Structural Virology Group at the EMBL Australia Node for Single Molecule Science. Having completed a bachelor of science majoring in biochemistry and chemistry, David undertook his PhD under the supervision of Professors Jill Trewhella and Mitchell Guss at the University of Sydney. During that time, David employed both crystallography and small-angle scattering to understand protein structure. He also authored the internationally accepted standards by which biological small-angle scattering data are now reported in publications. In 2012, the award of an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship enabled him to join the group of Leo James at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Here he studied the role played by the HIV capsid during the early stage of infection, revealing structural dynamics and interactions with the host at a molecular level not previously seen. Since returning to Australia, David leads an independent research team focused on understanding the molecular details of host-pathogen interactions through the use of crystallographic, single molecule fluorescence, and cryo-electron microscopy methods.

Professor Maria Kavallaris AM is Founding Director of the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine at the University of New South Wales, Head of the Translational Cancer Nanomedicine Theme at the Children’s Cancer Institute and a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator.

Professor Kelleher was appointed Director of the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney in early 2019. He is also Head of the Kirby Institute’s Immunovirology and Pathogenesis Program, and Principal of the Infection Immunology and Inflammation Theme at UNSW Medicine.

Associate Professor Cecile King, Ph.D., joined the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of New South Wales Sydney in 2021. CK received her Ph.D. in Immunology from UWA and completed her postdoctoral training at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA. She joined the faculty of the Garvan Institute for Medical Research, Sydney, Australia in 2005. CK continues to be intrigued by how the immune system maintains tolerance to self and has made important contributions to our understanding of adaptive immune responses and autoimmunity. CK’s current research focus is RNA at the immune interface: Understanding both immune recognition of RNA and immune regulation by non-coding RNA and transposable elements.

Megan Lord is an Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow in the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering and Academic Director of the Australian Graduate School of Engineering Industry PhD Program, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW Sydney.

A/Prof Marquis trained as a biochemical engineer and has current interdisciplinary research projects across protein biotechnology and in the bio-nanotechnology interface.

John Mattick is SHARP Professor of RNA Biology at UNSW Sydney.

BSc (Hons), PhD (UNSW)

Associate Professor Joshua (Josh) McCarroll is Team Leader in the Gene Therapeutics and Drug Delivery Group at Children’s Cancer Institute and Conjoint Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at UNSW Sydney.

Robert is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering.

Kate is is Scientia Fellow (Level C) in the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences (BABS).

Martin is a computational biologist with a background in biological sciences. After majoring in microbiology and immunology at the Université de Montréal, he undertook a Master's degree in bioinformatics at the Infectious Disease Research Centre in Quebec City, where he studied the genomics of parasitic protists. His interest in regulatory sequences in the non-protein coding genome brought him to Australia, where he completed a PhD in genomics and computational biology at the University of Queensland's Institute of Molecular Bioscience. His thesis (UQ's lucky 10,000th!) demonstrated that a substantial fraction of mammalian genomes harbours evolutionary signatures of molecular function through the conservation of RNA structures.

Dr Smith then leveraged the rise of high-throughput sequencing technologies during his postdoctoral research at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research in Sydney, where he developed new computational solutions for the analysis of human transcriptomic data. As an early adopter of nanopore sequencing technology, Dr Smith then founded the Genomic Technologies Program at the Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics in 2017, where his group developed new genomic applications for real-time single molecule sequencing. In 2019, Dr Smith moved back to Canada to lead a research team at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre (Canada's largest mother-child hospital) and teach bioinformatics at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the Université de Montréal.

Dr Smith has founded two commercial nanopore sequencing platforms and is listed as an author on several patents. His research interests are focused on transcriptomics and the integration of real-time sequencing and machine learning into new clinical applications.

Martina Stenzel is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor in the School of Chemistry.

 
Professor of chemistry specialising in RNA, peptide and supramolecular chemistry

Faculty of Science
School of Chemistry

Prof. Pall Thordarson (Palli) obtained his BSc. from the University of Iceland in 1996 and a PhD in Organic Chemistry from The University of Sydney in 2001. Following a Marie Curie Fellowship in the Netherlands he returned to Australia in 2003 and was then appointed at UNSW Sydney in 2007 as a Senior Lecturer where he became a Full Professor in 2017. He is currently the Director of the newly formed UNSW RNA Institute and the President-Elect of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI). He is also a program leader for the NSW RNA Production and Research Network and leads the NSW RNA Bioscience Alliance on the behalf of the NSW Vice-Chancellor’s Committee. 

Palli has published over 130 referred papers, including in prestigious journals such as Nature and Nature Nanotechnology. His research interest ranges from Nanomedicine and Light-harvesting Materials to Supramolecular and Systems Chemistry. He is focused on advancing our understanding of how molecules interact with one another and ‘self-assemble’, and how self-assembly can then be harnessed to create novel functional materials and systems. He has received a number of awards including the 2012 Le Fèvre Memorial Prize from the Australian Academy of Science for outstanding basic research in Chemistry by a Scientist under the age of 40.

My background is as a basic and translational scientist with extensive expertise in molecular virology (Nature Methods 2008; Nature Microbiology 2022; PloS Pathogens 2012; Traffic 2017; Nature Microbiology 2022) and basic immunology (Nature Immunology 2002, Blood 2004). Using this foundation, I have utilized many mechanistic aspects of basic science research to focus on translational solutions with regard to gene therapy efforts (Molecular Therapy, 2015 & 2017) and pandemic responses (PloS Med. 2021; Nature Microbiology 2022; Lancet Ebiomedicine 2022). As of January 2023 I have published over 86 primary journal articles in my field with total number of citations equal to 5340. 

Broadly, my research interests are in the area of molecular genetic mechanisms underlying human brain disorders. My PhD work demonstrated that unstable DNA repeats block replication fork progression in bacteria, yeast and mammalian cells by forming DNA-hairpins on the lagging strand (Voineagu et al. PNAS 2008), and investigated for the first time the cellular checkpoint responses to replication fork arrest at CGG repeats. This work led to a novel model of chromosomal fragility at CGG repeat sequences (Voineagu et al. Nature Struct. Mol. Biol 2009). For postdoctoral research, I joined the Neurogenetics Department at UCLA, to investigate the molecular mechanisms of autism and intellectual disability, using transcriptome methods.  My postdoctoral work led to the identification of a novel gene implicated in X-linked intellectual disability (Voineagu et al., Mol. Psychiatry 2011) and the characterisation of shared molecular pathways in autism post-mortem brain tissue (Voineagu et al. Nature 2011).Currently, my group's research concentrates on the molecular genetic mechanisms underlying normal brain function and their perturbation in neurodevelopmental disorders, using a combination of functional genomic studies in human brain tissue and neuronal cell culture systems.

I am from Sydney and spent almost a decade overseas in Massachusetts, USA. I have a background in physics and biochemistry, and enjoy working in the interdisciplinary fields of astrobiology, biophysics, and soft matter.

Experience and background

BSc (Adv H1M), The University of Sydney (2009)
SM in Applied Physics, Harvard University (2013) 
PhD in Applied Physics, Harvard University (2016)
NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow in Astrobiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (2016-2018)

Peter Wich leads the UNSW Research Lab for Functional Biopolymers. His primary research interests are in the fields of macromolecular chemistry at the interface between nanotechnology and bioorganic chemistry. His lab focuses on the chemical modification of natural biopolymers with the aim to engineer new multifunctional and biocompatible materials for applications in drug delivery, nanomedicine and bio-catalysis.