Department of Pharmacology Seminar Series
Seminars will be held as usual in the Departmental Seminar Room at 13:00 on Fridays in Full Term. After the talk there will be tea and cake and a chance to talk informally with the speaker.
If anyone wishes to have some time with any speaker before the talk, please contact comms [@] phar.cam.ac.uk in advance.
Schedule for Michaelmas 2025
Friday 9 January, 13:00 - 14:00
Speakers: Corinna Alberg and Sara Pensa (Cambridge Africa) and Lucy Woolhouse (Library)
Talk Titles: The Cambridge-Africa Programme, Sara and Lucy titles TBC
Biography:
Corinna Alberg: Corinna re-joined Cambridge-Africa in January 2023 and became the Programme Manager in January 2024 having been the THRiVE and MUII coordinator from 2016-2021. Corinna worked closely with THRiVE and MUII partners and Fellows based in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. Corinna established remote seminar series on immunology and bioinformatics to assist new Masters courses at Makerere University, Uganda and initiated a new collaboration between the Uganda Cancer Institute and a range of partners in Cambridge.
Corinna’s career has focused on public health. Between 2021- 2023 Corinna worked in Cambridge’s Department of Medicine as a Project manager on the THECA programme - a ‘real world’ clinical trial conducted with Congolese colleagues assessing the impact of a new Typhoid (TCV) vaccine being trialled in DRC and other parts of Africa. Corinna worked for 10 years at the PHG Foundation where her work focused on the incorporation of genetics into health care as genetics increasingly transformed medical and public health practice. Previously Corinna worked as a research associate at Manchester University, as a team leader in the North West Regional Health Authority developing primary care and as a senior health promotion officer in Central Manchester. Corinna’s interest in working with African colleagues on African health priorities was sparked by working as a secondary school teacher in Kenya.
Friday 16 January, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Professor Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, Head of IDEA and Chief Scientific Advisor at Novo Nordisk
Talk Title: GLP-1: the medicines, the biology, and the learnings
Biography: Lotte Bjerre Knudsen is a Danish national, born in 1964 in a small town near Copenhagen. Lotte holds a degree in biotechnology from the Technical University of Denmark, and a Doctoral Degree in Scientific Medicine from the University of Copenhagen, and she is an Adjunct Professor of Translational Medicine for Aahus University. Lotte has an H-index of 63, is an inventor on numerous patents, and is most prominently a recipient of the Paul Langerhans Award, the Science Mani Bhaumik Breakthrough of the Year Award, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Research Award and the Breakthrough Prize of Life Sciences.
Lotte Bjerre Knudsen is the Chief Scientific Advisor for R&D at Novo Nordisk. She heads up the team IDEA (Innovation & Data Experimentation Advancement) that focuses entirely on human data driven insights to inform drug discovery. Lotte has held her current role since 2022, after spending 2021 in Oxford. She is a long-time employee of Novo Nordisk, since 1989. Lotte is a co-inventor of liraglutide and has led all biology research programs for liraglutide and semaglutide from diabetes to obesity, cardiovascular, liver, kidney and Alzheimer’s Disease. She has been part of representing Novo Nordisk in five FDA Advisory committees
Lotte has received numerous awards. Most recently, she was a recipient of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Paul Langerhans Award from the German Diabetes Association, the STAT Biomedical Innovation Award, and a co-recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Mani Bhaumik Breakthrough of the Year Award.
The David James Lectures are the Department of Pharmacology’s flagship lecture series. Named after Dr David James, a former Departmental Administrator who left behind a legacy to the Department to provide scholarships to gifted postgraduates, this series aims to draw superstar research speakers to Cambridge, promoting collaboration and sparking inspiration. A list of previous speakers can be found here: https://www.phar.cam.ac.uk/david-james-annual-seminar-series.
Friday 23 January, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Professor Meritxell Canals Buj
Talk Title: Pharmacology, signalling and regulation of the mu-opioid receptor
Biography: Meritxell Canals joined the University of Nottingham in October 2018 as a Professor of Cellular Pharmacology at the School of Life Sciences. Her research interests focus on understanding the interactions between G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) and intracellular proteins, and their consequences for receptor signalling and trafficking.
Meritxell did her PhD in biochemistry at the University of Barcelona, Spain and at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Her PhD was part of a EU-funded multidisciplinary project that examined the interactions between adenosine and dopamine receptors in Parkinson's Disease. During her PhD, Meritxell obtained scholarships to visit the laboratories of Prof M Bouvier (pioneer in the application of BRET to GPCRs; Montreal, Canada) and Prof R Pepperkok (a leader in the development of FRET; EMBL, Germany). Dr Canals completed postdoctoral training in a series of leading pharmacology groups. In the laboratory of Prof G Milligan in Glasgow, (2005-2008) she focused on the functional consequences of GPCR co-expression and oligomerisation for which she developed novel RET techniques. As a senior post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Profs R Leurs and M Smit in Amsterdam (2008-2010) she focused on the regulation, pharmacology and medicinal chemistry of chemokine receptors. In 2010, Meritxell was awarded a Monash Fellowship to start her independent line of research within the Drug Discovery Biology (DDB) Theme at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS). In 2017 she took a sabbatical year to work with her collaborators in the departments of surgery (Prof N Bunnett) and pharmacology (Prof J Javitch) at Columbia University, New York. At the end of 2018, Meritxell moved to the University of Nottingham, to join the Centre of Membrane Protein and Receptors, (COMPARE) a joined venture between the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham.
Friday 30 January, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Dr Evangelia Petsalaki
Talk Title: From data towards Digital Twins of biological systems: Network-based approaches to study context-specific cell signalling.
Biography: Evangelia Petsalaki is a computational biologist with over 20 years of experience in systems biology, network biology, and modelling of cell signalling. Her research focuses on how dynamic, context-specific signalling processes determine cellular phenotypes, with direct relevance to disease mechanisms and therapeutic response.
Evangelia completed her PhD at EMBL Heidelberg in structural bioinformatics (Russell group; summa cum laude, Wilma Moser Prize), followed by postdoctoral work in Toronto integrating systems and experimental biology to study signalling rewiring (Pawson and Roth groups). Since 2017, she has led the Whole Cell Signalling group at EMBL-EBI, developing data-driven frameworks that combine machine learning, network biology, and perturbation data to build predictive models of cellular behaviour. Her work spans cancer drug resistance, immune signalling, metabolic liver disease, and organoid-based digital twins.
Overall, her work aims to bridge data-driven and mechanistic approaches to generate interpretable, predictive models that inform experimental design and translational decision-making.
Friday 6 February, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Professor Clare Bryant
Talk Title: TBC
Biography: Clare Bryant is Professor of Innate Immunity in the Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. She graduated in Biochemistry and Physiology in Southampton University before training as a vet at the Royal Veterinary College in London. She was funded by the Wellcome Trust for her PhD (in London) before moving to the William Harvey Research Institute for 4 years as a Wellcome postdoctoral fellow. She then moved to Cambridge as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow where she is now Professor of Innate Immunity. She has been on secondments in Genentech and GSK, has extensive collaborations with many pharmaceutical companies, is on the scientific advisory board of several biotech companies, has a drug discovery project with Apollo Therapeutics and helped found the natural product company Polypharmakos. During the COVID-19 pandemic she founded, and still runs, the Inflammazoom international seminar series. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Pharmacology Society in 2018, Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2023 and Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2023.
Friday 13 February, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Professor David Ron
Talk Title: How is Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Recognised?
Biography: David studies the adaptation of eukaryotic cells to the burden of unfolded proteins in their endoplasmic reticulum (ER). The context for this research is the observation that cells have mechanisms to ensure proper folding of proteins, but failures to maintain the proteome lead to toxic effects known as ‘proteotoxicity’. The latter affects poorly renewable tissues of long-lived organisms, exerting its deleterious consequences over extended periods of time. The accumulative erosive effects of proteotoxicity are believed to contribute to numerous diseases of ageing.
To meet this challenge, eukaryotes have evolved signalling pathways that detect the level of mismatch between burden and capacity (resulting in ER stress) and elicit rectifying responses. Collectively this constitutes an unfolded protein response (UPR) and is the focus of our lab.
Their long-term goal is to contribute to a detailed molecular understanding of protein folding homeostasis in the ER and to exploit this insight to develop tools for manipulating the UPR and possible therapies for inevitable failures of homeostasis. In this vein, our most important accomplishments of recent years are the elucidation of the biochemical basis of UPR activation and the discovery of a stress-responsive enzymatic mechanism that matches ER chaperone activity to unfolded protein burden post-translationally.
Monday 16 February, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Research Culture: Professor Yeun Joon Kim
Talk Title: Culture Creation and Change in Medical Institutions: Stage 1 Findings at IMS-MRL
Biography: Joon's research examines creativity, culture creation, and artificial intelligence (AI) within organisational and medical contexts. In studying creativity, I explore how work-relevant information, such as feedback and information structure, influences creative outcomes. For culture creation, he investigates why leaders frequently struggle to build functional cultures and how organisations can foster them effectively. His work on AI focuses on optimising human-AI collaboration in the workplace.
His work has been published in top academic journals, such as Academy of Management Journal and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. He currently serves on the editorial board of Academy of Management Journal.
Friday 20 February, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Professor David Shorthouse
Talk Title: AI (and robots!) for Accelerated Discovery in Pharmaceutical Science
Biography: David did his DPhil at the University of Oxford in molecular dynamics simulations before moving to the MRC Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge for his postdoctoral work in computational oncology, and taking up Fellowship at Murray Edwards College. In 2023 David moved to the UCL School of Pharmacy to start his lab. His group applies AI and machine learning methods coupled with robotics to accelerate optimisation and discovery in pharmaceutical science, integrating them into so-called “Self Driving Labs”. In 2025 David founded Implexis (www.implexis.ai), a spin out company building self driving labs for discovery of medicine formulations which has successfully raised venture capital funding over two rounds as of 2025.
Friday 27 February, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Dr Elle McDonagh
Talk Title: Variant interpretation at scale for safer and more effective disease treatment
Biography: Ellen McDonagh, PhD, is the Translational Informatics Director of Open Targets and is Group Leader for the Open Targets Core Team at the EMBL-EBI. She oversees and develops the strategy for Open Targets open source resources and the informatics research programme, collaborating closely with both academic and industry partners to systematically identify and prioritise targets in a range of diseases to develop safer and more effective medicines. Prior to joining the Open Targets team, she was the Head of Curation and Pharmacogenomics at Genomics England/QMUL. She helped pioneer a crowdsourcing platform (PanelApp) for the expert review and curation of gene panels, which are used in genome interpretation for diagnosis of rare disease patients as part of the 100,000 Genomes Project, and now adopted by the NHSE Genomic Medicine Service and Australian Genomics. Ellen also led projects to expand the scope of information analysed in patient genomes. These included health-related additional findings, and evidence-based pharmacogenomics to support the prediction of drug responses to improve patient safety and therapeutic outcomes. Before joining Genomics England, she worked as a Scientific Curator at the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB) at Stanford University. In this role, she produced clinical guidelines regarding therapeutic recommendations based on a patient’s genotype, provided critical assessment of evidence for gene-drug associations, and published genetically associated pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic pathways. She is on the Science and Industry Advisory Board (SIAB) for ELIXIR-UK and the Steering Committee for The UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network. She is a member of the Royal Society of Biology.
Her research interests include pharmacogenetics and understanding a patient's response to medicines in order to help prioritise new targets and build therapeutic hypotheses. She is also interested in understanding disease mechanisms, learning from the biology of both rare and common diseases to better stratify, diagnose and treat patients. She is keen to focus on diseases that are under-represented, rare or have not been successfully treated, as well as ensuring better representation of under-represented patient groups and ethnicities. She is a co-lead of a CZI-funded project to build digital twins for rare diseases and the UKRI MRC-NIHR funded Open Psychiatry Project.
Friday 6 March, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Postdoctoral Research Associate Talks: Dr Shanlin Rao, Dr Balila Boi
Talk Title: TBC
Friday 13 March, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Professor Gabriel Balmus
Talk Title: TBC
Biography: Interested in the mechanisms controlling the maintenance of nuclear and mitochondrial genomes in mature neurons, Prof Gabriel Balmus joined the UK DRI at Cambridge in 2018. Obtaining his PhD in Molecular and Integrative Physiology in 2013 at Cornell University, USA, he went on to complete postdoctoral training at the Gurdon Institute at University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. As Group Leader, Gabriel brings his wealth of expertise to research genomic instability in neurodegenerative diseases.
Friday 20 March, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Professor Ben Lehner
Talk Title: TBC
Biography: Ben Lehner, Senior Group Leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is one of the most influential geneticists of his generation. He has made fundamental discoveries about the biological consequences of mutations and how they interact to cause disease, particularly cancer. He provided the first genome-scale map of how mutations interact in animals, revealing the importance of non-additive interactions in pathology and the importance of chromatin regulators as modifiers. His work in inter-generational epigenetics showed that long-lasting trans-generational epigenetic memory of environmental change is possible. Professor Lehner has shown that mutagenesis can determine protein structures and he has developed the first general method to identify allosteric sites in proteins, which holds great promise for understanding biological regulation and drug discovery.
Friday 27 March, 13:00 - 14:00
Speaker: Professor Gopal Sapkota
Talk Title: TBC
Biography: The past research in my lab has identified some key molecules in the regulation of the TGFβ/BMP pathways and opened up hugely promising avenues for further research on understanding their precise modes of action. My current and future research aims to build on the most exciting discoveries that my group has made and bolster the molecular understanding of their function, regulation and significance to human diseases, particularly cancer. Much of the work involves understanding their role and regulation through phosphorylation and ubiquitylation processes. I hope the findings will provide a framework of understanding and potential targets that could be exploited for therapeutic intervention against diseases such as cancer.The past research in my lab has identified some key molecules in the regulation of the TGFβ/BMP pathways and opened up hugely promising avenues for further research on understanding their precise modes of action. My current and future research aims to build on the most exciting discoveries that my group has made and bolster the molecular understanding of their function, regulation and significance to human diseases, particularly cancer. Much of the work involves understanding their role and regulation through phosphorylation and ubiquitylation processes. I hope the findings will provide a framework of understanding and potential targets that could be exploited for therapeutic intervention against diseases such as cancer.