Meet the team

Mark Waters (group leader)

After obtaining his PhD from the University of Nottingham, Mark took up a postdoc stint with Jane Langdale at the University of Oxford. In 2010 he migrated to Western Australia to work with Steve Smith on mode of action of karrikins.

In 2016 he took up an ARC Future Fellowship in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UWA.

Nithya Palanivelu (PhD student)

Nithya​ ​studied Chemistry & Biological Chemistry at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore in 2012, followed by an MSc in Analytical Chemistry (2013) and a Higher Degree by Research (2014), both at UWA. She commenced her PhD in 2015, jointly supervised by Dr Gavin Flematti and Mark​.

Kim Melville

After joining the lab as an undergrad, Kim is now a UWA Masters of Biotechnology student carrying out a research project in the lab. He’s working on protein purification and bio-assay development.

Georgia Hosking

Georgia is a UWA final year undergraduate studying Genetics and Biochemistry majors. She is helping to isolate higher order mutants in hormone metabolism genes in Arabidopsis, and recombinant protein expression.

Jiaren (Hugh) Yao

Hugh joined the lab in 2017 as a Masters of Biotechnology student. He is currently working as a research assistant while he applies for a PhD scholarship.

Yongjie (Frank) Meng

Frank is a visiting PhD student from the Sichuan Agricultural university in China, starting from February 2018. He is working on the interaction of karrikins with auxin and light signalling.

Mitchell Gill

Mitch is an undergraduate at UWA, studying Biochemistry and Computing Science. He joined the lab in 2018, and is generating CRISPR/Cas9 knockouts in genes of unknown function in Arabidopsis.

You?

Want to be the next recruit? Opportunities to join the lab are currently available.