Dr Emma Watson completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Richard Payne at the University of Sydney, where her research focused on developing synthetic methods to access post-translationally modified proteins. She then completed a postdoctoral appointment in the group of Professor Nicolas Winssinger at the University of Geneva as an EMBO postdoctoral fellow, working on logic gated biosupramolecular systems for oncology. She then returned to Australia in 2022 to begin her independent career at the University of Adelaide before moving to MIPS in 2025 as a Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow. Her research focuses on developing responsive therapeutic systems based on biomolecules, which are capable of leveraging Boolean logic to improve safety and precision.  

• Developing new methodologies for protein synthesis and late stage modification
• Exploring post-translational modifications as a means of regulating the function of therapeutically relevant proteins 
• Using nucleic acid mimics (PNA - Peptide Nucleic Acids) as components in molecular circuits to enable targetted drug delivery or activation