Akane Kawamura

Professor of Chemical Biology
Newcastle University

Akane Kawamura is a Professor of Chemical Biology at Newcastle University. After obtaining M.Chem and D.Phil degrees at University of Oxford, she spent three years in the biotech sector where she led a number of drug discovery projects across a wide range of therapeutic areas. In 2009 she returned to academia as a postdoctoral scientist and subsequently became a Principal Investigator in the Department of Chemistry and Radcliffe Department of Medicine at University of Oxford. She was awarded a BHF CRE Senior Research Fellowship in 2012, a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship in 2013 and an ERC Starting Grant in 2016. Her group’s research focuses on understanding the chemistry of epigenetic regulation, the development of chemical probes against epigenetic modifying enzymes, and the development of peptide-based target validation approaches.