PEOPLE - APPOINTMENTS

Dr Anja Winter joins Biochemistry

Dr Anja Winter has recently joined the University to become a member of the Dr Richard Bayliss research group the Department of Biochemistry. She joins us from the University of Cambridge where she had been a member of Professor Sir Tom Blundell’s lab since 2008. Whilst there she had been working on a challenging fragment-based drug discovery project aimed at dinging inhibitors against metastasis which led to the discovery of several promising drug leads. It was the prospect of helping to understand crucial mechanisms in cancer and developing chemotherapeutics against prominent cancer targets which attracted Anja to Leicester. Her aim here is to elucidate the regulatory mechanisms of separase, the protease that triggers chromosome segregation.

During an MSc in Biochemistry at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany, Dr Winter became interested in studying biological systems using biophysical techniques and their value in investigating molecular mechanisms behind cellular processes. This interest was further extended during a Darwin-Trust funded PhD in Biochemistry/Structural Biology at Edinburgh University by the idea of modifying the interplay between structures, properties, functions and assemblies of proteins.

Dr Winter is a member of the Biochemical Society and the Protein Society.