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

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.

Sabrina Davies

A joint PhD student with Prof Charlie Bond (UWA School of Molecular Sciences), Sabrina joined the lab in 2018 and is training to become a structural biologist with interests in plant hormone signalling mechanisms.

Jiaren (Hugh) Yao

Hugh joined the lab in 2017 as a Masters of Biotechnology student. As of November 2018 he is now a full-blooded PhD student in the lab, working on a number of projects relating to karrikin signalling.

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.

You?

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