Dr Lauren Coulson

Lauren completed her PhD in medical biochemistry under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Blackburn at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2014. During her PhD she spent a year as a visiting Commonwealth PhD Scholar in Sir Tom Blundell’s biocomputing group at the University of Cambridge in the UK, where she gained valuable experience in protein modelling. Following her PhD, she completed her postdoctoral research under the guidance of Prof. Kelly Chibale and Prof. Edward Sturrock at UCT. During her doctoral and postdoctoral studies, Lauren worked on a variety of enzyme systems including human cytochrome P450 enzymes, human zinc metallopeptidases and protein and lipid kinases, gaining expertise in recombinant protein expression, enzymology, assay development and structure-based drug design.

In 2019 Lauren joined the Holistic Drug Discovery and Development (H3D) Centre to establish an enzymology platform focused on Plasmodium kinases as targets for malaria drug discovery. In 2020 she was awarded a 2-year Future Leaders – African Independent Research (FLAIR) Fellowship to expand her work on Plasmodium kinases. The FLAIR Fellowship Programme is a partnership between the African Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society funded by the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund.

Lauren is now a Chief Investigator at H3D where she leads the Enzymology Platform supporting malaria, TB and AMR target-based drug discovery projects. Lauren also serves as an H3D representative for the Malaria Drug Accelerator (MalDA) Consortium, an international drug discovery platform made up of academic and industry partners funded by the Gates Foundation.