Please congratulate CHIRI 2017 Honours Student, Melissa Eccles, who was awarded a Dementia Australia Research Foundation PhD Scholarship to continue her work from her honours year, where she identified important regions within the enzyme responsible for amyloid-protein production in Alzheimer’s disease.

Her PhD project will use a combination of lab based experiments and computer modelling here at CHIRI, to now refine and pinpoint area(s) within this region that could potentially offer targets for designing more selective small molecule therapeutics aimed at slowing down or preventing build-up of pathogenic Aβ.

Melissa is supervised by A/Prof Giuseppe Verdile, Dr Mark Agostino and A/Prof David Groth (School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences) and involves collaborations with A/Prof Michael Lardelli (University of Adelaide), Prof Paul Fraser (University of Toronto) and Professor Imre Berger (University of Bristol).