Madeline Kavanagh

Madeline earned her BSc (Medicinal Chemistry and Immunobiology) and MSc (Chemistry) at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she worked on the design and synthesis of kinase inhibitors targeting LRRK2. She completed a PhD (Chemistry) at the University of Cambridge, UK under the guidance of Professor Chris Abell. During her PhD, Madeline applied fragment-based lead discovery to develop small molecule inhibitors that target essential Mycobacterium tuberculosis enzymes. While completing her thesis, Madeline joined a collaborative drug discovery project (ENABLE) in Professor Chris Schofield’s lab at the University of Oxford, where eh contributed to the development of novel, broad spectrum metallo-β-lactamase inhibitors that resensitise antibiotic resistance bacteria. Madeline subsequently joined Professor Ben Cravatt’s lab at The Scripps Research Institute California as a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow, where she pursued a chemoproteomic strategy to help develop the first selective, allosteric JAK1 inhibitor.

Madeline’s started her independent career in 2024 as a group leader at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on applying chemical proteomics and fragment-based strategies to develop chemical probes that have novel targets and mechanisms of action. Her research group has a special interest in targeting immune dysregulation in chronic, infectious, and psychiatric diseases.