Dr. Mathias Hansen is a postdoctoral researcher at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute with expertise in structural and computational biology. After completing his BSc and MSc at the University of Copenhagen, where he studied RNA-protein interactions under Professor Peter Brodersen, he earned his PhD from Monash University in 2021, supervised by Professor Max Cryle, studying the enzymes that build complex antibiotics like teicoplanin.

Dr. Hansen's research interests center on understanding enzyme structure-function relationships and applying computational methods to enzyme engineering. His work explores how enzyme function evolves and how these insights can guide the design of enzymes with novel functions. Using approaches such as ancestral sequence reconstruction, he has investigated the evolutionary pathways of biosynthetic enzymes, particularly those involved in natural product biosynthesis.

His structural biology studies focus on biosynthetic enzymes including cytochrome P450s and non-ribosomal peptide synthetases, where he applies X-ray crystallography to reveal molecular mechanisms of substrate recognition and catalysis. Dr. Hansen combines these structural insights with computational design methods to develop engineering approaches for modifying enzyme function.

Dr. Hansen is particularly interested in the application of modern computational tools including machine learning approaches to enzyme engineering challenges, with the goal of developing biocatalysts for sustainable chemistry applications.