Maher Lab

Members of the Maher Lab"We use a combination of bioinorganic chemistry, biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology to assemble a holistic view of how trace elements are used by biological systems." Megan Maher 

Techniques

  • Cellular metal homeostasis: how trace elements are balanced within biological systems
  • Metal transport across membranes: structures and functions of integral membrane protein transporters
  • Metals in the mitochondria: mechanisms of assembly of mitochondrial complexes relevant to mitochondrial disease
  • Electron transfer within and between protein metal sites.

Group Members

Group Leader

Professor Megan Maher

Postdoctoral Scientists

Saumya Udagedara Shadi Maghool​

Graduate Researchers - PhD students

Nilakhi Poddar

Portrait of Megan Maher

Biography

Megan Maher was awarded a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Melbourne in 1998. She carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Sydney from 1998-2005, funded by a series of independent Fellowships from the Australian Synchrotron Research Program, the Australian Research Council and the University of Sydney. Between 2006-2007, she held the position of Team Leader in the Membrane Protein Crystallography Laboratory, headed by Professor So Iwata at Imperial College, London. In 2008 Megan returned to the Centenary Institute in Sydney, on a Career Development Fellowship funded by the Cancer Institute of NSW.  Megan relocated to La Trobe University at the beginning of 2012 to take up a position as LIMS Senior Research Fellow. In 2015 she was appointed to the position of Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in 2018. In 2017 Megan was awarded the Georgina Sweet Award for Women in Quantitative Biomedical Science and in 2018 an ARC Future Fellowship. Megan joined the School of Chemistry and Bio21 at the University of Melbourne in 2019 as part of the University’s Driving Research Momentum (DRM) strategy. Megan’s current research focuses on investigating the role of trace metals in biological systems, with a particular focus on the structural biology of metalloproteins and integral membrane protein transporters.