Ada H. Liebenau

I am a third year DPhil student in Interdisciplinary Bioscience (BBSRC Doctoral Training Programme) in the group of Professor Jelena Bezbradica Mirkovic, co-supervised by Professor Stuart Conway in the Department of Chemistry. 

I completed an integrated masters at University College London (UCL) during which I worked on developing a patient-specific blood-brain barrier model for intracellular drug delivery to glioma, brain cancer, using polymersomes (nanocarriers) with Professor Giuseppe Battaglia. During my masters I worked part time as a Clinical Observer at Kings College Hospital (KCH) working on biliary atresia diagnostics with Professor Alastair Baker (KCH) and Professor Alastair Sutcliffe (UCL). After my masters I worked as a Research Assistant at UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research with Professor David Selwood working on selectively modifying Cyclosporine A with Grubbs 3rd Generation catalyst.  

In the Bezbradica Mirkovic Lab we currently focus on inflammasomes, which serve as key inflammatory platforms in response to signals originating from microbes, as well as damage-associated signals. Since inflammasome activation leads to a lytic cell death termed pyroptosis, their activation has to be tightly regulated. My current research is at the interface of chemistry and biology where I am developing chemical tools to study inflammasomes.