LAB MEMBERS

Dr Kilian Huber

Principal Investigator

Dr. Kilian V. M. Huber received his doctorate in Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich working on the design and synthesis of natural product-inspired kinase inhibitors in the group Prof. Franz Bracher. After postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Prof. Stephen G. Davies at the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford, and in the laboratory of Prof. Giulio Superti-Furga at the Research Centre for Molecular Medicine (CeMM), Vienna, he joined the SGC in 2015 as Principal Investigator and Chemical Biology Group Leader. In 2014 he was selected as a Winner of the GSK Discovery Fast Track Challenge, his other awards include the 2015 Young Investigator Award of the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG-Stiftung/Horst-Böhme-Stiftung) as well as a ThermoFisher TMT Research Award in 2017.

Anne-Sophie Marques

Postdoc

Dr. Anne-Sophie Marques completed her Bachelor in Chemistry at the University of Versailles in France and her Master in Chemistry and Organic Chemistry at the University of Paris Sud. She then entered the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris where she graduated in 2015 with a dual Master degree in Molecular Chemistry from Pierre and Marie Curie University.
During her studies, she undertook several research internships in medicinal chemistry and organic synthesis at Sanofi in Chilly Mazarin, Roche in Basel and the CNRS in Versailles.
She then pursued her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Paris Saclay where she worked on the development of new domino reactions for the synthesis of polycyclic compounds under the supervision of Pr. X. Moreau. She left France for Newcastle University in January 2019 to work as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the development of new anticancer agents under the guidance of Dr. C. Cano. She started a new Postdoctoral Researcher position in the Huber lab in April 2021 to work on the development of new degraders for cancer research.

Esra Balıkçı

Postdoc

Dr Esra Balıkçı completed her Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Izmir Institute of Technology. She then pursued her PhD studies as a SINGA scholar of Agency for Science, Research and Technology (A*STAR) at the National University of Singapore. Under supervision of Prof Haiwei Song, her research focused on activation mechanisms of the Hippo kinase signalling cascade. Additionally, she worked on the development of inhibitors targeting the Hippo signalling pathway. She joined the Huber group at the Target Discovery Institute in April 2021 where she focuses on the structural and biochemical characterizations of novel targets involved in cancer and inflammatory disorders.

Jesper Hansen

Postdoc

Dr Jesper S. Hansen is a biomedical and biophysical research scientist specialising in the biology and targeting of integral membrane proteins, as well as proteins interacting with cellular lipid membranes. Jesper completed his degree in biomedicine (MSc) at the University of Southern Denmark and did his PhD with the Danish biotech company Aquaporin A/S and Technical University of Denmark, DTU Nanotech. He has since worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Copenhagen (DK), University of Southern California (US) and Lund University (SE) before joining University of Oxford (UK) in 2019. His work comprises of establishing and running biochemical and biophysical analyses of proteins including solute carrier target engagement assays.

Srinivasa Rao Adusumalli

Postdoc

Dr Srinivasa Rao Adusumalli obtained his Master of Science in Organic Chemistry from Acharya Nagarjuna University (India). During his Ph.D. in Chemistry under the supervision of Dr. Vishal Rai at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER Bhopal, India), he developed chemical technologies for single-site labeling of native proteins. Later he joined “Plabeltech Private Limited” (India) and was involved in developing the toolbox for precision labeling of antibodies. As a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Prof. Bernardes group at University of Cambridge (UK), he developed covalent small molecules for redesigning the structure and function of biomolecules and enabling the degradation of target protein. In April 2022, he joined the Dr. Huber group as Oxford-BMS Fellow at Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford. He is currently working on the development of new tools for systematic profiling of E3 ligase complexes with small molecule modulators.

Usha Singh

Postdoc

I completed my Master of Science in Biotechnology from Banasthali University, India, after which I joined Nucleoporin & Sumo Biology Group at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal (India) for PhD. During my PhD I worked to delineate the relation between nucleoporin over expression and mechanistic role in cancer. In addition to this I also worked to investigate the biological functionality of protein modification and drug modification chemistry. I then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in a collaborative project at National Centre for Cell Science, Pune India and Bharat Biotech International Limited, Hyderabad, India where we generated human neutralising monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV2. I joined Huber group in March 2022 as postdoctoral scientist in an exciting and translational project with Cancer Research UK and Merck. I will be working to elucidate the molecular dynamics of transcriptional complexes in cancer to develop novel drug targets.

Jiangpeikun Song

D Phil student

Jiangpeikun Song obtained his BS degree in Biology at Tsinghua University in 2019, with his thesis focusing on fluorescence polarization microscopy. After finishing his Bachelor's degree, he joined the Huber group in October 2019 as a DPhil student. Currently he is working on identifying E3 ligase targets using proximity-labelling based approaches.

Elisabeth Mira Rothweiler

D Phil student

Mira Rothweiler completed her degree in Pharmacy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich in 2018. Before obtaining her German Pharmacy license in 2019, she gained practical experience as a pharmaceutical intern at the Adler Apotheke in Hamburg. For six months, she joined the Huber group at the University of Oxford where she synthesised bifunctional degraders and subsequently tested them in cellular assays. In October 2019 Mira started her research project as an NDM studentship DPhil candidate. Currently, she is investigating new approaches for targeted protein degradation and ligand-based screening under co-supervision of Dr Kilian Huber and Prof Paul Brennan.

Ludwig Bauer

D Phil student

Ludwig studied biochemistry at the Technical University in Munich (Germany). During this time, he participated in iGEM’17, an international student competition in synthetic biology, as member of the joint team of both Munich universities. Interested in chemical biology, he joined the Cravatt group at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego (USA) as a visiting student, for which he was supported by an Otto-Bayer scholarship. Subsequently, he completed an internship at Roche in Basel (Switzerland) developing a LC-MS method for quality assessment of therapeutic antibodies. For his master thesis project he joined the Superti-Furga lab at the Center for Molecular Medicine (Austria) where his work focused on characterizing protein-protein interactions involving transporters of the Solute Carrier family by MS-based proteomic approaches. Currently he is working towards a DPhil as part of the Chemistry in Cells doctoral programme - co-supervised by Dr Kilian Huber and Prof Michael Willis.

Jeppe Tranberg-Jensen

Research Assistant

Jeppe completed his Bachelor and Master degree in Molecularbiology at Aarhus University(Denmark). During his master thesis, Jeppe developed and optimised a method of spatiotemporal loss of function in mice and celllines, to accelerate the understanding of protein function in memory. In our group, Jeppe is working as a Research Assistant, developing high throughput cellular assays for drug discovery.

Carol Cheng

Research Assistant

Dr. Cheng Lai Hung Carol completed her Bachelor in Biochemistry at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with first-class honour and her MPhil in Biomedical Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
She then pursued her PhD in Pathology at the University of Hong Kong where she worked on cancer epigenetics and studied the pathological functions of bromodomain-containing proteins under the supervision of Dr. Wong Chun Ming Jack. She left Hong Kong and joined Huber lab in August 2021 as a research assistant because she is interested in drug development and industrial projects. Currently, she is working on assay development and high throughput screening.

Nitisha Gurav

Laboratory Technician

Nitisha received her degree in Pharmacy from the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai. During this time, she interned at Abbott Healthcare’s I&D department and CSIR-National Chemical laboratory. In 2020, she relocated to the United Kingdom to pursue her master's in Biotechnology at the University of Nottingham, supported by the Developing Solutions Scholarship. She used an in-silico proteomics approach to identify surface proteins in the cattle blood parasite, Theileria Parva, for her master's thesis. After graduation, she worked as a research assistant for the ONS COVID-19 surveillance project at the University of Oxford. She worked with liquid handling platforms for high-throughput ELISA screening in this position. In October 2022, she began working as a technician with protein expression and purification in the Huber group at Target Discovery Institute.

Kathrin Weller

Visiting Student

Kathrin obtained her degree in Pharmacy at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main in 2022. During this time she interned at the Knapp Group where she synthesized bifunctional degraders and gained experience in biochemistry methods. In addition to this, she worked on quality control of nucleic acids for Biospring as a working student. Currently, she is doing a research internship at Oxford University as part of her training to obtaining her German Pharmacy license.