People

Tara graduated in 2022 with a degree in Biomedical Sciences from New College, University of Oxford, where she was an academic scholar. She specialised in cancer and immunology, culminating in a lab project in the Department of Pharmacology supervised by Dr Lanyon-Hogg, in which she developed methods to study the pharmacological disruption of reactive cysteines in live cells. Following graduation, Tara worked for 6 months as a professional medical writer, producing congress materials on behalf of pharmaceutical companies such as UCB, Ipsen and Novartis, before deciding to go back to research and joining the EDV Lab.

Aside from science, Tara is an experienced choral singer and acted as Vice President for Operations and Finance for the New College JCR Committee.

Tara’s project focuses on the development of chemical biology tools to modulate protein phosphatases.

Boman completed her MRes at King’s College London, where she investigated new methods for studying peptide–protein interactions under the supervision of Dr. Manuel Müller. Her work involved protein purification and analysis. Following her master’s degree, Boman spent a year working in industry as a project manager, specializing in peptide purification and antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) development.

Boman is studying and developing covalent ligands for a protein phosphatase for applications in targeted protein dephosphorylation.

Mark graduated in Chemistry at the University of Plymouth in 2020. After his undergraduate degree, he worked in the Cambridge Lighthouse Lab, preparing and analysing patient samples for the presence of COVID-19. He then graduated from his MRes in Organic Chemistry: Drug Discovery at University College London (UCL) in 2022. His research project focused on developing peptidomimetic compounds as inhibitors for the SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following his Master’s, Mark spent 2.5 years working as a medicinal chemist at the Alzheimer’s Research UK Drug Discovery Institute at UCL. He designed and synthesised compounds for several challenging CNS drug discovery targets and collaborated within a larger multidisciplinary team spanning chemistry, biology and screening & pharmacology.

Mark’s project is a collaboration with AstraZeneca to develop covalent PHOSTACs for targeted protein dephosphorylation.

My name is Grace. After completing a three-year Biochemistry degree at Queen Mary, continuing my studies here with an MSci was a natural progression. My undergraduate dissertation focused on breast cancer and I have a strong interest in pharmaceutical chemistry, hence the opportunity to join Dr. Elena De Vita’s research team seemed like an excellent fit.  I’m genuinely excited about the work we’re doing and looking forward to the discoveries ahead.

Grace is studying phosphosignalling pathways in cancer cellular models.